James and Boggs: A Literary Power Couple's Shared Focus on Black Queer Histories
Marlon James and Nicholas Boggs, a couple since 2018, have both been shortlisted for major British literary awards this year. James is on the Booker Prize list for his novel 'The Disappearers,' while Boggs is on the Baillie Gifford Prize list for his biography 'Baldwin: A Love Story.' Their works are interconnected, as Boggs’s research on James Baldwin’s 1969 direction of a play in Turkey provided the structural foundation for James’s novel. The pair, living in Brooklyn, maintain separate writing processes but are collaborating on a film adaptation of Boggs’s biography, produced by Higher Ground.