Women’s prize winner Tayari Jones: ‘Before this, I had never won a raffle’
An American Marriage is a story about the traumatic effect of injustice on a black family in the US. But it might never have been published if it wasn’t for the intervention of a mystery author
‘I’m a person,” says Tayari Jones, the morning after carrying off the Women’s prize for fiction for her fourth novel, An American Marriage, “who before this had never even won a raffle. Truly. I remember, as a child, you could win a whole summer of ice-cream and I saved and I bought several tickets. I did not win and the little girl who won only had one ticket. How about that? I’ve been holding that grudge for 40 years.”
An American Marriage, the story of a black man falsely imprisoned for a violent assault on a woman he glancingly meets in an Atlanta motel, has certainly transformed Jones’s literary fortunes. Crucially, it caught the eye of Oprah Winfrey, who last year selected it for her Book Club – a guarantee of enormously enhanced sales and profile. Then came the moment when the former US president Barack Obama included it on his increasingly celebrated list of summer reading, praising its “moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple”.