Paul Beatty is the winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, an award given each year for the very best original novel written in English. Much to the surprise of many of those who anxiously awaited the name of the winner, it is for the first time that an American writer receives this prestigious award. But according to the critics his novel,
The Sellout, although there was some stiff competition, was the rightful winner of the Man Booker Prize, placing him ahead of other competitors. It is also with this book that Paul Beatty also won the National Book Critics Circle Award earlier this year.
Paul Beatty was born in 1962 in Los Angeles and studied at the Brooklyn College and the Boston University. So far he has published four novels -
The White Boy Shuffle (1996),
Tuff (2000),
Slumberland (2008),
The Sellout (2015) - two poetry titles -
Big Bank Takes Little Bank (1991) and
Joker, Joker, Deuce (1994) - as well as an african-american humour anthology in 2006, titled
Hokum.
Photo: theguardian.com