South African author Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize, a prestigious British literary prize, on Wednesday evening for “The Promise”, a book about the passing of time in a white farming family in post-apartheid South Africa.
Posted
Update
Reading time : 1 min.
Launched in 1969, the Booker Prize annually rewards the author of “the best novel written in English”. The winner wins a prize of 50,000 pounds – around 55,000 euros – and the assurance of international fame. This year, the South African Damon Galgut was crowned for his novel The Promise.
“I am deeply, humbly grateful”said the 57-year-old winner, a third-time Booker Prize finalist. Moved, he greeted a “great year for African writing”, marked by the Nobel Prize for Literature of Abdulrazak Gurnah, Briton born in Zanzibar. “It’s a process that will continue. Lpeople are going to take African writing a little more seriously “, warned Damon Galgut at a press conference, “there are a lot of wonderful writings coming from us”. Upon receiving the award, Damon Galgut emphasized that he wanted to accept it for “all the stories that have been told and those that have not”, writers, recognized or not, “of this remarkable continent”.
Covering the period from the end of apartheid until the presidency of Jacob Zuma, his book, The Promise, traces, over a series of funerals, the gradual dislocation of a white family in Pretoria as the country emerges towards democracy. In a video released before the announcement of the result, the author explained that he wanted to show in this book “the passage of time and what it does to the family, what it does to the country’s politics and what it does to notions of justice”.
The president of the jury, the historian Maya Jasanoff, underlined the“originality” and the “incredible fluidity of voices”, of the work, “a dense book, with historical and metaphorical significance”. The New Yorker qualified The Promise of “remarkable”, while South Africa’s Sunday Times ruled “amazing how many stories Galgut manages to put in this short novel”.