Marlon James and Nicholas Boggs: literary couple, double shortlist

By Elena Vasquez

Marlon James and Nicholas Boggs are both shortlisted for major British literary prizes this year — James for the Booker with The Disappearers, Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction with Baldwin: A Love Story. Between them, the couple has produced two books that took years of work, each centered on the lives of Black queer men whose stories have been overlooked.

The label now attached to them — "literary power couple" — sits somewhere in the lineage of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, or Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. James, 55, is not entirely comfortable with it.

"I'm not sure what to do with it," James says. "I have all these romantic notions that we were like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne or something – I don't know. What do you think?" Boggs laughs: "It's all very new. We're still getting used to it."

The interview takes place on a warm October morning in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the apartment the pair has shared for a little under a year. James, born in Jamaica, won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings — the first Jamaican to do so. Boggs, 53, his partner of nearly nine years, spent two decades researching Baldwin's intimate life for his first book.

Takeaway: two partners, two shortlists, two books about Black queer lives, in a single year.

How did they meet?

Not in a literary salon. They met on a dating app.

"I was on the apps and was like, well, I'm only dating in my neighbourhood," Boggs says. "He was three blocks away, so it was perfect."

Both were in their 40s. Boggs had never dated a writer before — "it was mostly bartenders," he jokes. He knew of James's work but hadn't read it. James didn't know Boggs was a writer.

"It was a very chaste first date," James says. "We were gentlemen." The relationship developed "healthily slowly" over a summer apart while Boggs taught in London. Then James invited him to a Booker anniversary event in the British capital — and set the bar high.

"Our third date was at Buckingham Palace," James says. "I try to keep it classy, you know, gotta impress him. We actually made out in the queen's bathroom."

Their apartment walls hold art by African American and queer artists, from erotic photography to paintings. At one point they retrieve an original 1938 portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney, the Harlem Renaissance artist who mentored Baldwin and features heavily in Boggs's book. A monumental horse sculpture — bought by James after his 2015 Booker win and christened "Booker" by Boggs — stands alongside a similarly imposing gorilla.

What are the two books about?

The Disappearers, James's sixth novel, is a dark reckoning with Aids-era gay life and homophobia in Jamaica. It grew out of a rumoured homophobic attack in a middle-class area of Kingston in the late 1980s.

"I first heard about it when I was 21," James says. "I knew it happened, I just couldn't prove it. It haunted me: the idea that that could happen – and in a posh neighbourhood – was one of the things that certainly pushed me firmly into the closet."

He interviewed almost 20 people in Jamaica over several years to piece the incident together. "I wanted to fill in the blanks," he says. "I wanted to give those guys back some sort of agency and power."

Growing up gay and closeted in 1980s Kingston, James was "the school homo" in class and tried to become straight at church. He built a queer identity only after moving to Minneapolis to teach in 2007. He read Baldwin's Giovanni's Room for the first time at 50. "The first thing I thought was I could never have read this at 20," he says. "I was so in the closet."

Boggs's path ran through Baldwin from childhood in Washington DC, where his father was a civil rights attorney. Studying Baldwin in college, he found a reference to an out-of-print children's book by Baldwin, illustrated by the French artist Yoran Cazac. Suspecting a love affair behind the collaboration, he tried to track Cazac down and was told he was probably dead. Weeks later, the phone rang.

"It was Yoran saying, 'I'm alive, I'm in Paris, come on over, I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy,'" Boggs recalls. "That was 23 years ago, and it began a realisation that there were these untold stories in Baldwin's life that needed to be unearthed."

"We both respond to gaps," Boggs says.

How did one book shape the other?

James wanted to build his novel around the production of a play but couldn't find one that fit. Boggs, researching his biography, discovered Baldwin had directed a 1969 production of John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes in Turkey, and suggested it.

"At first you were like, 'no,'" Boggs recalls. "And I was like, 'just read these 60 pages'. And I was right."

The play anchors both the novel's structure and Boggs's chapters on Baldwin's life in Turkey. "I like to say I plundered his book with his permission," James says. "It's one way in which our books wouldn't be possible or wouldn't have ended up the way they did were we not together."

Unlike Didion and Dunne's creative osmosis, the pair keep manuscripts private until finished. "Marlon didn't read my book until after it was finished, I finished his on the publication date," Boggs says. Their habits differ too: James is a binge writer who needs "lots of free jazz"; Boggs writes daily in "perfect peace and quiet," often from a separate office blocks away. Living with James taught Boggs that "this is a job." They insist there is no competition. "Getting these stories told is so much more important than any individual anyway," Boggs says.

What did the critics say?

The New York Times of 25 September carries a review by Dwight Garner calling The Disappearers "a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century," placing it alongside Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. An author friend emailed James about a "stonking review"; James thought "stonking" meant something bad. "So I'm like, 'God, no. I'm not going to read this.'"

"I went to the newsstand to go find it, because I still didn't believe it," he says. "I was like, 'if I leave this bed, I'm going to wake up.'"

He resists expectation. "There's a part of me that still thinks I'm this underground, scrapping writer who got lucky," he says. "I don't know if I want to get to that point where I start to expect good reviews."

Why do the stakes feel high now?

PEN America reported this month almost 12,000 book bans in US public schools during the 2025-2026 school year — the highest single-year figure on record.

"I do sometimes get this fear that the oppressors are coming, because they always burn the books first," James says. "The forces stacked against me are immense. But then, when have the forces against us not been immense?"

Asked if they have considered leaving the US, James answers: "Yes, 100%." "I think we're becoming a banana republic, which, coming from the Caribbean, I know a lot about," he says.

He is not a pessimist. "I have to have a pretty big sense of optimism to think that my big-ass books are going to sell," he says. "I've never lost faith in the reader."

What comes next?

Baldwin: A Love Story has been optioned for a film by Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama's production company. Boggs chose his screenwriter immediately: James, who has written for screen including the series Get Millie Black.

"I think even we are surprised how smooth it's going," Boggs says. "But we're just so interested in each other's work and interested in how one another thinks."

For Boggs, the work carries a debt to the dead. "When you grow up in the shadow of Aids, you don't necessarily think that you have a future," he says. "We lost so many great artists, gay artists. So there's a certain kind of responsibility to telling those stories. There are so many that still need to be told."