The literary power couple is a historically seductive concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds entwined, each becoming witness to and critic of the other’s work. Think Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
Or, less auspiciously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Now, into this illustrious company steps a new pair: the novelist Marlon James and the biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards – James for the Booker prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Between them, they have produced two formidable books, each the culmination of years of work, and each concerned with the lives of Black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked.
What do you think?” He turns to Boggs, who laughs. They are relaxing on a chaise longue, looking comfortable enough to have been there all morning. Their exchanges have the easy rhythm of a long relationship, full of small corrections and private jokes.
James, the 55-year-old Jamaican-born novelist whose 2015 book A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker prize, is back on the shortlist this year with The Disappearers, a sprawling, dark reckoning with the brutality of Aids-era gay life and homophobia in Jamaica. Boggs, his 53-year-old partner of nearly nine years, has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for his first book, Baldwin: A Love Story, a biography of James Baldwin that draws on two decades of research into the writer’s intimate life and creative relationships. I don’t think I’ve seen his eyes get quite that wide before.” James had the first taste of the excitement, when the Booker shortlist was announced in September.
The pair have been together since 2018 and have lived in this apartment for a little under a year. Its walls form something of a shrine to their work and interests, crowded with art by African American and queer artists, from intimate, often erotic photography to paintings. At one point they rummage beneath the bed to retrieve an original 1938 painting by Beauford Delaney, the Harlem renaissance artist who became one of Baldwin’s mentors, and features heavily in Boggs’s book.
A monumental horse sculpture dominates the room – or, as Boggs points out with a laugh, “it’s really just the horse’s ass, isn’t it!” Bought by James after his 2015 Booker win and christened “Booker” by Boggs, it stands alongside a similarly imposing gorilla. Their romance began not in a rarefied literary salon, but through the very ordinary business of a dating app. Boggs, who had never been out with a writer before – “it was mostly bartenders”, he jokes – knew of James’s work, but hadn’t read any of his books.
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