Booker Prize: How South African author Damon Galgut won prestigous award

DAMON Galgut of South Africa has won the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction with his novel The Promise. He follows last year’s Scottish winner Douglas Stuart, who won with his debut novel Shuggie Bain.

One of a short list of six, Galgut’s victory was announced live on the BBC on Wednesday night, and as well as a cheque for £50,000, Galgut, 58 next week, will now enjoy vastly increased sales of this book and his backlist of eight published novels which includes two other books that were nominated for the Booker Prize.

He had been a warm favourite to win the Prize, though of course the panel of judges were sworn to secrecy and only made their final decision a few hours before the award ceremony. Chaired by historian Maya Jasanoff, the panel consisted of writer and editor Horatia Harrod; actress Natascha McElhone; twice Booker-shortlisted novelist Prof Chigozie Obioma; and writer and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

By common consent among the literati, they have made a good choice as winner.

WHO IS DAMON GALGUT?

BORN in 1963 and raised in Pretoria when apartheid still ruled the roost, Galgut survived childhood cancer to become head boy at his high school before he went on to study drama. His first novel, A Sinless Season, was published when he was just 17. There have been eight subsequent novels, published at irregular intervals. One of them, The Quarry, has been turned into a feature film twice.

He was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003 for The Good Doctor which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for that year. He was nominated again for In a Strange Room in 2010, so The Promise is third time lucky for Galgut. He has also had several plays produced and is working on a second collection of short stories.

Galgut realised early on that he was gay and said this about it: “Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I’ve always had the advantage of alienation.”

He also loves to travel.

ANY LINK TO SCOTLAND?

JUST literary ones – he is a big fan of Scottish Booker winners James Kelman and Douglas Stuart.

One of his favourite books – and the one he singled out for praise on the Booker Prize website – is the 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late, the Glasgow-set novel by James Kelman, which charts the story of Sammy Samuels, a foul-mouthed working class Glaswegian.

Galgut says of Kelman’s approach: “In almost all his stories, there is one particular character at the heart of it, and he concentrates his attention so fiercely on this person that every tool at his disposal – even grammar and idiom and sentence structure – is bent to serve his purpose. Consciousness is his true subject, and he pursues it through language; everything else is secondary.

“Sammy’s furious voice caused controversy at the time. Kelman came under attack for his potty-mouth, which now seems like a quaint complaint, but there were also objections that the Scottish, working-class dialect made his work inaccessible. So it’s gratifying to hear Douglas Stuart describe How Late It Was, How Late as a book that changed his life, because he could see his own people – and, presumably, himself – on the page.

“That’s not a small thing, of course. But for somebody like me, who has never set foot in Glasgow, the opposite is true: it shows me people I don’t know, in ways that make them profoundly real. By being so highly localised and particular, Sammy becomes universal.”

WHAT IS THE PROMISE ABOUT?

CENTRING on the Swart family, The Promise of the title is one the Swarts make and fail to keep over decades to give a home and land to the black woman who worked for them all her life.

Here’s how Galgut describes it: “The original idea came from a conversation with a friend, who’s the last surviving member of his family. He’s a great raconteur and he told me one drunken afternoon about the four family funerals he’d attended – of his mother, father, brother and sister – and he made them tragic and hilarious. And it occurred to me that it would be an unusual and interesting way to construct a story. Four funerals, a day or two in each case, no narrative filler in between.

“You’d get the history of a family in four separate snapshots. From there it was a short hop to the notion of setting the funerals in different decades, and of what you could convey through those big jumps in time. Not only about politics, but about people’s lives.”

WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING ABOUT THE AWARD?

THE judges praised The Promise as “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh”, and panel chair Maya Jasanoff added: “We felt among the judges that this book really is a tour de force.”