South African favourite wins £50,000 Booker Prize

HE was the twice-nominated bookmakers’ favourite to win.

And last night it was third time lucky for South African Damon Galgut as he scooped this year’s £ 0,000 Booker Prize for his ‘tour de force’ novel, The Promise.

Galgut, 7, shortlisted in 2003 and 2010, was compared to William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf for his ‘incredibly wellconstructed account’ of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid in Pretoria. He becomes only the third South African to win the award, after Nadine Gordimer for The Conservationist in 1974 and J. M. Coetzee for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999).

Maya Jasanoff, who chaired the judging panel and read Galgut’s novel three times in nine months, described it as ‘profound’, adding: ‘It manages to pull together the qualities of great storytelling.

‘It has great ideas, it has a lot to chew on, with remarkable attention to structure and literary style. I felt every time I read it I was entering a space that could tell me something different.’

Galgut beat British-Somali author Nadifa Mohamed (The Fortune Men), Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam (A Passage North), and Americans Maggie Shipstead (Great Circle), Richard Powers (Bewilderment) and Patricia Lockwood (No One Is Talking About This) to take the title.

The prestigious literary prize was set up to celebrate British and Commonwealth writers but entry rules were changed in 2013 to allow any submissions published in English by a UK publisher.

Scottish author Douglas Stuart won last year’s Booker Prize for his hard-hitting novel Shuggie Bain.