The Sellout has been named the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction, making Paul Beatty the first American writer to win this prestigious Prize.

A laugh-out-loud, blistering satire on race relations in contemporary America, The Sellout sits comfortably alongside works by Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift.

Chair of the 2016 judges, Amanda Foreman, says: ‘ The Sellout is a novel for our times. A tirelessly inventive modern satire, its humour disguises a radical seriousness. Paul Beatty slays sacred cows with abandon and takes aim at racial and political taboos with wit, verve and a snarl. … While you’re being nailed you’re being tickled. It is highwire act which he pulls off with tremendous verve and energy and confidence. He never once lets up or pulls his punches. This is somebody writing at the top of their game.’

The Sellout is published by small independent publisher Oneworld, who also published last year’s Man Booker winner Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Alongside The Sellout, the shortlist included Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, All That Man Is by David Szalay, and Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a £50,000 prize literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. You can read more about the prize here.