Booker Prize 2021: Damon Galgot wins first literary prize for ‘The Amazing’ Promise

[ad_1]

Novelist and playwright Damon Galgot won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise.

The news was announced on Wednesday (November 3) during a ceremony in London.

The South African writer was shortlisted for the third time this year, having reached the finalist in 2003 and 2010.

The Promise is a family story set in Pretoria, where Galgut grew up, and told through a series of four funerals.

Galgot, who lives in Cape Town, told BBC Radio 4 in an interview last week that he was inspired to experience this narrative structure during a “semi-drunken afternoon” with a friend who shared “a whole series of funeral tales”.

“It occurred to me that it would be a new and interesting way to engage with a family saga,” Galgot said. “If the only thing you have is a little window that has opened over these four funerals and you don’t get the full path of the family story, as a reader, you have to fill in those gaps yourself. I am fascinated as a writer by the edge of the map, by the things not said — tacitly, suggested.”

Damon Galgut’s The Promise wins the 2021 Booker Prize

(Booker Awards)

Damon Galgot at the Booker Prize 2021 shortlist readings at the Southbank Center in London

(David Sandison, for the Booker Prize)

Maya Jasanoff, chair of the 2021 judges panel, said the promise “astounded” this year’s judges “as a penetrating and well-designed account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its consequences.”

“With every reading we felt the book was growing,” Jasanoff added. With an almost illusory narrative economy, it offers moving insights into generational divisions; reflects on what makes life satisfying – and how to cure death; and explores the monumental allegorical implications of ‘promise’ in relation to modern South Africa.

In addition to Ms. Jasanoff, the 2021 jury included writer and editor Horatia Harrod. Actor Natasha McCalone. twice shortlisted for novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma; and writer and former bishop Rowan Williams.

The Promise is Galgot’s ninth novel, and the first in seven years. Galgut was previously nominated for a Booker Prize in 2003 for The Good Doctor and in 2010 with In a Strange Room. His 2005 novel The Quarry was adapted into two films.

As the 2021 Booker Prize winner, Galgot will receive £50,000 and a copy of the designer’s book. All selected authors, including the winner, were awarded £2,500.

The authors shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 are Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, Nadiva Muhammad, Damon Galgot, Maggie Shepsted and Anouk Arudbragasam.

(David Sandison, for the Booker Prize)

This year’s winner was chosen from among 158 novels published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2020 and September 30, 2021. Patricia Lockwood Nobody talks about this; Nadifa Mohamed for The Fortune Men. Richard Powers perplexed. And Maggie Shipstead for The Great Circle.

[ad_2]