My Hero: Toni Morrison by Marlon James

‘Her novels transformed the way I think,’ says this year’s Man Booker winner

Galvanising … Toni Morrison. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Marlon James

Saturday 17 October 2015  The Guardian

I read Toni Morrison’s work for the first time in 2001. I had showed one of my early drafts to the author Elizabeth Nunez, and when she read it her response was, “you’re a good writer, but you don’t know anything about women”. I was shocked. I had a strong mother, I grew up in a house of women, what did she mean? She wasn’t talking about knowing women personally, she explained, but understanding female literary space. She asked me a question that I think would test a lot of men: how many women have you read? I had to admit that apart from some dead Victorians, I hadn’t really read any.

Song of Solomon and Sula both profoundly changed my life, but in very different ways. Like Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Song of Solomon was incredibly galvanising: it made me want to write. It’s Morrison’s loosest novel, an epic about an extraordinarily dysfunctional black family. It becomes almost magical realist, and has the most plausible supernatural ending I have ever read – I finished that novel thinking I could fly.

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