Paul Beatty has became the first author from the United States to win the Man Booker Prize, for his novel The Sellout, which he said should not be read as a "mono-directional" take on race.
The jury behind the world’s most prestigious English-language literary award said the novel was a “shocking and unexpectedly funny” portrayal of Beatty’s native Los Angeles, using satire to explore racial equality in a fictional neighbourhood.
Beatty said readers should think of the novel as a work of fiction rather than solely focusing on race. “I tend to bristle when people say it’s black, it’s angry, it’s about race,” the 54-year-old writer said after picking up the £50,000 (Dh223,000) prize at a glitzy black-tie ceremony in London’s historic Guildhall building on Tuesday.
“Hopefully it’s not so mono-directional. These labels are more malleable than we like to think about them.”
Beatty appeared overwhelmed when he took to the stage to receive the award from Prince Charles’s wife, Camilla. “I can’t tell you guys how long a journey this has been for me,” he said.
The jury said that through his “equally affectionate and bitterly ironic portrait of the city and its inhabitants, Paul Beatty dodges inherited views of race relations, solutions or assumptions”.
The author “presents through his beguilingly honest and well-intentioned hero an innocent’s view of his corrupt world”, the jurors added, bringing “the unendurable status quo of present day US race relations to an absurdist conclusion”.
One other American novel was among the finalists: Ottessa Moshfegh's twist on the psychological thriller, Eileen.
Bookies had considered Beatty a long-shot. The favourite was Canada's Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing, the story of two families roiled by China's tumultuous history during the 20th century.
* AP