GLOBAL TRAVELER

Vanities/Field Trip

A look inside the writing room of Marlon James, whose new novel explores the nature of storytelling

Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, can write almost anywhere—except, he says, in his own apartment. "I have a fully functional office at home that I've never stepped into. It has a computer. It has a printer. It has a scanner. And it has cobwebs." Instead, the Kingston, Jamaica-born writer bikes to Minneapolis's Stevens Square, where his workspace walls are lined with research for his Dark Star Trilogy, a fantasy set in an otherworldly Africa. The much-anticipated first volume, Black Leopard Red Wolf, is out this month.

KEZIAH WEIR