Man Booker prize winner tells of how religion intensified his struggle with his sexuality as a youth

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Jamaican novelist Marlon James, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2015, wanted to alter his sexuality “more than anything” in his youth and underwent a gruelling religious ritual to try to “drive out the gay”, he is to explain in a radio interview on Sunday.

But it was only when the writer eventually turned away from formal religion and left the Caribbean that he was able to fully accept his homosexuality and even write about it. As Desert Island Discs’ latest castaway on BBC Radio 4, James details the extreme evangelical exorcism, or “gay cure”, he endured at a Pentecostal church in Jamaica.

The writer, who earned literary fame with his third novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings, had thrown himself into religion to fit in with Jamaican society and tells Lauren Laverne he did not realise he was gay.

“I was at church almost every day of the week,” he said, adding that he told himself God would provide a wife who would understand his struggle.

He describes the exorcism process as “a kind of mental control”: “Back then I thought they were just driving out demons,” he recalls.

James said he was sick multiple times during the “cure”: “Then one day it hit me: ‘What if I got rid of the church?’ And that worked smashingly.”

Moving to the United States allowed him to write more freely about his sexuality.

“I’m too much of a wuss to be an atheist, but I don’t think I have faith any more,” he tells Laverne.