Zee JLF: I like chronicling my raw nerve, says 2015 Booker Prize winner Marlon James

His first time in India to attend the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, Marlon James created nearly as much of a stir with his angry Facebook post about the slack service at Delhi airport, as he did for having won the 2015 Booker some months ago for "A Brief History of Killings". But he hadn't anticipated how much he'd anger everyone. "I completely get it. I am deeply critical of Jamaica but I always have my guard up when other people do it," he says.

Of the post, James says it was sent off in the heat of the moment and wasn't meant to be mean-spirited. "I've been to Vegas; I've been to La Guardia in New York and La Guardia is a horrible airport. I've also been in wonderful airports in horrendous countries. Nobody judges a country by its airport. It's also interesting that nobody paid attention to the posts right after. 'But now that I'm out of that airport…it's INDIA, people.' Nobody cared about that. But that doesn't sell copies of newspapers, I suppose."

But James — a native of Jamaica who now teaches creative writing in Macalester College, Minnesota — has no qualms about the tone of the post, the use of cuss words and colloquial half-sentences. "I like chronicling my raw nerve," he says, "that's what Facebook posts are for. When I want to write a deeply nuanced account, I write an article."

Several characters from A Brief History, speak in just this breathless rush, a mix of "standard English", Jamaican patois, snatches of rock and hip-hop. "Language to me is at its best when it is dirty and corrupted a little bit," he adds.

A Brief History… is a 700-page tome set in Jamaica (and later New York), that takes off from an attempted assassination of Reggae singer Bob Marley by a band which enters his house in Kingston, Jamaica in 1976. The novel then pans out to focus on events over the next two decades, through the lives of seven assassins, following them through the bloody squabbles between Jamaica's main political parties and their goons, the CIA which meddles in the affairs country hoping to influence of nearby Cuba, the drug mafia wars, and so on. For readers in India, not very familiar with all this recent history and even less with Rasta-speak, it can be somewhat hard to make sense of at first read.

James, however, denies that he was consciously trying to be difficult, that readers have to get over their mindsets in order to enter a work of art. "I think sometimes there is some work for the reader to do. People forget how difficult Charles Dickens is. There are so many Dickens movies; but most people have read the abridged stuff. Dickens books are very hard to get into. The first time I read Faulkner's The Sound & The Fury I didn't know what the hell was going on. The second time I read it, it was the most gorgeous thing I ever read," James says, who confesses to having greatly admired Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

He is now working on a film version of A Brief History, to be produced by HBO. "I am hugely inspired by cinema, in some ways even more so than books. Things like how do you make a storyboard for a character, how to make it resonate even though you don't spend a lot of time, how play with distance, how can you bring a certain musicality or punch to story-telling. I love the idea of jump-cuts, of frames constantly cutting, zooming, following one character, leaving him and going off elsewhere," he says.

But the film version, which should be done next year, will be very different from the novel, he promises. "Anyone worried they'll see a film version of the book? Trust me, they'll be so different," he ends with a shake of his dreadlocks.