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Man Booker Prize 2016: Paul Beatty has won with his novel The Sellout | Man Booker Prize 2016: Paul Beatty has won with his novel The Sellout |
(35 minutes later) | |
Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker Prize with his novel The Sellout. | Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker Prize with his novel The Sellout. |
The win makes Beatty, 54, who teaches at Columbia University, the first American to be awarded the prize in its 48 year history. | |
Born in Los Angeles, California in 1962, Beatty left home at 17 to study at Boston University, and later studying creative writing and poetry at Brooklyn College, New York. | |
The Sellout, set in LA and which includes the fallout from the unjust shooting of an African-American at the hands of the police, was described by judges as a "novel of our times". | |
They added it "takes aim at racial and political taboos with wit, verve and a snarl". | |
The New York-based writer has previously told the Paris Review that he was "surprised" that everybody keeps calling The Sellout a comic novel, adding: "I'm not sure how I define it." | |
Published by independent publishers Oneworld – who also won in 2015 with Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings – The Sellout was also handed the National Book Critics Circle Award. | |
It his Mr Beatty's fourth novel, following on from Slumberland, Tuff, and his 1996 debut The White Boy Shuffle which explores gang culture in LA. | |
He has also published two books of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce and in 2006 edited an anthology of African-American Humour – Hokum. | |
Mr Beatty was not favourite to win the prize, with Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project tipped to win. | |
Additional reporting by Press Association |