Marlon James is the author of four novels including A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and most recently Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. The novel is the first in a planned epic fantasy trilogy set in an ancient, mythical Africa. A profile in the New Yorker called it a novel that “counters the dominant impression of the genre it inhabits. Instead of kings with swords and flaxen-haired princesses, the novel contains pitch-skinned witches haloed in bees, and vampires that turn your blood into blue lightning, and demons that come screeching across rooftops in the dark.”