South African writer Damon Galgut has won the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “The Promise”.
“The Promise” is about one white family’s reckoning with South Africa’s racist history as the family fails the commitment to give their Black maid her own home. The novel is set in Pretoria where Galgut grew up.
It was Galgut’s third time as a finalist for the $68,175 (50,000 pounds) English language literary award prize, for a book the judges called a “tour de force” whne the prize was announced.
Galgut said that he was “stunned” to win despite the fact that he was given the status of ‘favourite’
Galgut said in his acceptance speech “It’s changed my life and please know I am profoundly, humbly grateful for this, It’s taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn’t be here.”
Galgut who wrote his first novel at the age of 17 said he wanted the critically acclaimed novel to show how “the passing of time” impacts a family, a country, its politics and “notions of justice” – all while also exploring mortality.
Speaking immediately after winning the Booker, Galgut paid homage to his home continent.
He said “This has been a great year for African writing and I’d like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I’m part of.”
He emphasized that this year’s Nobel literature laureate, Zanzibar-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was also African.
Previously he was shortlisted for “The Good Doctor” in 2003 and “In a Strange Room” in 2010, but lost both times.
Now, he is the third South African novelist to win the Booker Prize, after Nadine Gordimer in 1974 and J.M. Coetzee, who won twice, in 1983 and 1999.
“The Promise” was selected over five other novels, including three by US writers: Richard Powers’ “Bewilderment,” the story of an astrobiologist trying to care for his neurodivergent son; Patricia Lockwood’s social media-steeped novel “No One is Talking About This” and Maggie Shipstead’s aviator saga “Great Circle.”
The other finalists were Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s aftermath-of-war story “A Passage North” and British/Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed’s “The Fortune Men,” about a Somali man falsely accused of murder in 1950s Wales.
