On Wednesday, Damon Galgut became the third South African author to win the Booker Prize, the holy grail of Western awards for literature.
This is also the third major victory for African writers in 2021. On October 7, Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
On the day that Galgut’s win was announced, Senegalese author Mouhamed Mbougar Sarr became the first writer from Sub-Saharan Africa to win France’s most coveted literary award, the Goncourt prize.
Galgut, born in Pretoria in 1963, studied drama at the University of Cape Town and published his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was 17. In 1988 he followed this triumph with an acclaimed collection of short stories, Small Circle of Beings. In 1991, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, Galgut’s novel about a young white South African who has a mental breakdown while doing military service, brought him international attention.
More books followed. Two of these, The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This week his most recent novel, The Promise, won. Previous South African winners were Nadine Gordimer in 1974 for The Conservationist and JM Coetzee (twice) for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999).
Galgut is a different kettle of words from the more “establishment” South Africans who precede him. Chair of the Booker judges Maya Jasanoff described The Promise as “a tour de force” and judge Chigozie Obioma said: “Galgut makes a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world?”
Galgut takes home the £50,000 prize (about R1m) but in the publicity-shy mode of reclusive authors such as JD Salinger, he has been reluctant to comment on this achievement.
The New York Times attempted to compare Galgut’s writing to that of Coetzee, “whose novels distil apartheid’s violence in dark fables of devastation. Both writers’ themes lie where the political, spiritual and physical converge, the nightmare of racist violence suffused with the insistent neediness of the body.”
Sunday Times Books reviewer Kate Sidley said: “The Promise is steeped in politics, if not explicitly political. It touches on the pressing issues of the day over four decades: conscription, state violence, race, privilege, and land ownership, to name a few. It’s astonishing how much history Galgut packs into this short novel — even the TRC and Rugby World Cup get a passing mention.”
Fourie Botha, Galgut’s local publisher at Penguin Random House SA fiction imprint Umuzi, said: “In an unassuming, tentative way, Damon Galgut has dedicated his life to writing. Seeing how the world takes notice of this masterful writer is almost as pleasurable as reading his sentences and realising you’re dealing with words that are charmed.”
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