News by Julie
All You Need to Know About the First American Man Booker Prize Winner
Paul Beatty's The Sellout
Paul Beatty won the Man Booker Prize earlier this week for The Sellout. Here’s all you need to know about him and his book in less than 1 minute:
The Sellout is a satire about a Black American named Me trying to reintroduce slavery and segregation as a way of saving his Los Angeles neighbourhood from gentrification. Me ends up in the U.S. Supreme Court where he has to defend is racist actions.
Full of biting humour, swearing and frequent use of the n-word, The Sellout is a punchy read not for the faint hearted.
The book was turned down by no less than 18 publishers in the UK, before independent publisher Oneworld eventually picked it up.
It’s Oneworld’s second Man Booker win in a row after last year’s A History of Seven Killings.
Beatty, who teaches creating writing at Colombia University, advises his students to ‘listen to yourself listen…to think about what gets in and what doesn’t.’
Personally, I found this book hard to get into but I promise I will give it another try…
