Paul Beatty won the 2016 Man Booker Prize for fiction for his novel “The Sellout,” a dazzling written, wickedly funny satire of race set in South Los Angeles. Beatty is the first American to win the prize, which was awarded at a black-tie ceremony in London on Tuesday.

“I’m not going to get all dramatic, writing saved my life or anything like that,” he said from the stage, searching for words. “But writing’s given me a life.”

The Man Booker Prize, which comes with an award of about $61,000, is one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes. It was first presented in 1969, but Americans were not eligible until 2014.

Last year, Jamaican-born Marlon James, who lives and teaches in Minnesota, won the prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”


Beatty appeared surprised that his novel had been selected from the six shortlisted titles. “I can’t tell you guys how long of a journey this has been for me,” he said. He thanked his agent, his girlfriend, and his editor. At times, he choked up.

“Can I talk about the book for one second?” he asked, getting a laugh. “I did a reading in Detroit, at a small college, they did a little get-together in my honor with some city kids, I had to do a formal reading like this — I wasn’t dressed as formally,” he said, a nod to the tuxedo he wore. “I couldn’t get through the second paragraph of the book — I just started crying, crying, crying. I couldn’t stop crying. … This went on for five minutes. … I finally got some semblance of composure, and I said, ‘As hard as I work on everything I’ve ever written, when I heard that book out loud, it was the first time I had heard it out loud, or really read it, and I was like, oh my goodness, it matches exactly the language in my head.’”

It was a nod to the difficulty of the project of writing. “I didn’t want to write — I hate writing,” Beatty added. But he was prompted by Creative Capital, a nonprofit that provides funds directly to artists and writers, to undertake something, and that something was the genesis of “The Sellout.”


In the L.A. Times review, Kiese Laymon wrote that Beatty’s novel “is piloted by black American voices … ‘The Sellout’ makes room for both satirical spectacle and earnest literary whispers. Beatty’s reliance on so many textured backstories and secondary characterizations feels both revelatory and absolutely intentional.”

“The Sellout” was also the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It’s Beatty’s fourth book.