Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. Julie Sternberg: Could you share with us one or more of the stories that you read and thought, “I definitely want to incorporate this.” It’s in reading some of this crazy stuff, I’m like, man, this is 100 books. I didn’t start out to actually write anything. So that’s what sent me on this whole quest to find my mythological history and religious history and so on. And because I didn’t know all of that history, I couldn’t write a Lord of the Rings or a Narnia, or even an Arabian Nights.

And I think after a while I just said, “You know what? You can keep your Hobbit.” Not his Hobbit, but still.īut then when he mentioned the whole thing about folklore and mythology, I realized I didn’t really know any African mythology and folklore.

And having met members of the Tolkien family, they’d have been excited by something like that. And I said, “You know, if we open up in the Shire and saw an Asian Hobbit, nobody would care.” And he said, “Well, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are based on British folklore and British mythology and Celtic mythology and so on.” And I said, “You do know that The Lord of the Rings isn’t real?” You really can do what you want. Marlon James: They announced the cast, and it was a fight we always have about representation and about diversity. Would you mind telling us about that fight? Julie: So you have said that you embarked on writing this trilogy after a fight that you had with a friend when the cast for The Hobbit movie was announced. Marlon shares with Julie and Eve how certain experiences in his own life have shown up in his work, and he previews “Get Millie Black,” the crime drama he is writing and producing for HBO, which his mother “will say is inspired by her, because she is a detective. Marlon talks about his new novel, Moon Witch, Spider King, the follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019.

This week on Book Dreams, co-hosts Eve and Julie discuss all of this and so much more with Marlon James, the powerhouse author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The structuring of an immersive, propulsive fantasy trilogy. African folklore and mythology, and how they help establish that “homophobia is not African.” How reading Jackie Collins and Leon Uris during childhood fosters a lifelong passion for books.

Marlon james dark star trilogy book 3