Marlon James, by any rights, should be the pride of Jamaica as the first author from the country to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

But instead he was forced to flee Jamaica after being exorcised and tortured by priests in an attempt to ‘cure’ his sexuality.

The 45-year-old, who won the award for his novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings, has spoken about how he was forced into going through an exorcism by the ‘ex-gay’ movement in his mid-thirties.

He said he recalled being in a room with two preachers and having an exorcism via ‘a mixture of prayer and support and shaming and vomiting’, according to reports in The Times.

‘I thought, “Great, I am getting rid of demons”,’ and he was under the belief he was cured. He was not.

‘I then read up on the whole ex-gay thing,’ he added. ‘It is dangerously misleading and I think has been discredited. It is a really primitive and backward way of curing people.’

James decided to ‘get rid of the church part, not God, and that worked wonderfully’.

‘Gay cure’ therapy has been widely discredited by the World Health Organization and nearly every mainstream health and psychology service in the world. It is considered dangerous to a person’s mental and physical health and should not be attempted by anyone.