Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' is first US Booker Prize winner

LONDON (AP) — Paul Beatty's "The Sellout," a stinging satire of race and class in the United States that has drawn comparisons to Richard Pryor and Mark Twain, won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday — the first time an American has taken the prestigious fiction award.

Historian Amanda Foreman, who chaired the judging panel, said the book "plunges into the heart of contemporary American society, and with absolutely savage wit — the kind I haven't seen since (Jonathan) Swift or (Mark) Twain."

"The Sellout" is set in a rundown Los Angeles suburb called Dickens, where the residents include the last survivor of the Little Rascals and the book's narrator, Bonbon, an African-American man on trial at the U.S. Supreme Court for attempting to reinstate slavery and racial segregation.

Racial stereotypes, offensive speech and police killings of black men are all subject to his scathing eye.

Beatty was awarded the 50,000 pound ($61,000) prize by Prince Charles' wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, during a black-tie ceremony at London's medieval Guildhall.

The other contenders were Graeme Macrae Burnet's Scottish murder story "His Bloody Project"; Deborah Levy's tale of mother-child trauma "Hot Milk"; and "All That Man Is," a portrait of masculinity in a fragmented Europe by Canadian-born British novelist David Szalay.