Damon Galgut becomes 2021 Booker prize winner

(News 1st); Novelist and playwright Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel 'The Promise'. The news was announced on Wednesday (03) during a ceremony in London. The South African writer had been shortlisted for the third time this year, after being a finalist in 2003 and 2010. The Promise is a family saga set in Pretoria, where Galgut grew up, told through a series of four funerals. Galgut, who lives in Cape Town, told BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in an interview last week that he was inspired to try out this narrative structure during a “semi-drunken afternoon” with a friend who shared “a whole series of funeral anecdotes”. Maya Jasanoff, the chair of the 2021 judges, said The Promise “astonished” this year’s judges “as a penetrating and incredibly well-constructed account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its aftermath”. the 2021 judging panel included writer and editor Horatia Harrod; actor Natascha McElhone; twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma; and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams. The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel, and his first in seven years. Galgut was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 for The Good Doctor and in 2010 with In a Strange Room. His 2005 novel The Quarry has been adapted into two films. The authors shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize were Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, Nadifa Mohamed, Damon Galgut, Maggie Shipstead, and Anuk Arudpragasam with his novel, A passage north.