Paul Beatty Wins The 2016 Man Booker Prize

At the ceremony in Guildhall, London, writer Paul Beatty was announced by the Man Booker Committee as this year’s prize winner. He is the first American to snag to award since the Committee opened its purview in 2013 to include novels from any country written in English.

Visibly emotional, Beatty said repeatedly that he did not expect to win before letting the honor sink into him: “I can’t tell you guys how long this journey has been for me,” he stated in his speech.

He continued: “Some years ago I did a reading in Detroit, some small college with city kids. I wasn’t dressed as formally. I started reading, and I couldn’t get to the second paragraph of the book — I started crying. Couldn’t stop crying… This went on for five minutes… This was the first time I read it out loud, and I realized it was exactly what I’d wanted to do, exactly the music in my head.”

As our US literary editor previously wrote, The Sellout doesn’t try to “make light of a dire situation. Instead its humor masks a deeper racial rancor. Consider the opening sentence, ‘This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.'” The narrator has taken as a slave a former Little Rascal named Hominy Jenkins, who makes a living acting out black stereotypes. He has also managed to segregate, at least momentarily, both schools and buses. In penning what may be the first great social satire in a generation, Beatty tips his hat toward comedian Dave Chappelle’s famous sketch of blind and black KKK member Clayton Bigsby. Both are uncomfortably comic.

The Sellout, which won last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction is Beatty’s fourth novel, and his first in seven years. The Sellout continues Beatty’s satirical explorations of race, which were first demonstrated in The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which takes the form of a memoir written by a mega best-selling African-American poet and proclaimed “Negro Demagogue” who accidentally incites people to suicide in the name of freedom. This was followed by Tuff (2000) that tells the story of a teenage drug dealer who launches a campaign to become a New York City councilman. Slumberland released in 2008 placed its African-American protagonist in Berlin where he struggles to make a living as a DJ.

With Beatty’s chosen as the first American to win the Man Booker Prize, the Committee has acknowledged a high-brow satire that as Barron wrote “poignantly grasps contemporary racial tensions.” This isn’t just a win for Beatty’s literary talent, it’s a bow to his artistry of Western black culture. As Beatty said of his win: “Writing’s given me a life.”