Hello readers!

The DWL Lit Bites series is a way to aggregate literary news from around the interwebs and share them with you all. Watch this space every Friday at 4 pm.

1. Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize this Tuesday for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. At approximately 700 pages, the novel is anything but brief but with sentences like “Reason is for the rich. We have madness,” the violence and skill of Brief History pulls you right in. Enjoy an interview with the author in the New York Times.

2. Marlon James was the first Jamaican to have won the Man Booker and this year even the Nobel committee was feeling magnanimous by awarding a journalist with the Prize in Literature. Svetlana Alexievich is the 14th woman to be awarded the prize “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Here’s everything you need to know about her.

3. Speaking of awards, a group of writers in India returned their Sahitya Akademi awards to protest the killing of notable scholar M M Kalburgi, who was also vice-chancellor of the Akademi. He was shot dead in his home on August 30 and the committee held no condolence ceremony. Read the whole story here.