Jewish novelist wins Booker with tale about apartheid
SOUTH AFRICAN author Damon Galgut has scooped the prestigious Booker Prize with his new novel The Promise, about South Africa during the country’s transition out of apartheid.
Mr Galgut received the £50,000 prize in a ceremony on Wednesday that was broadcast live on the BBC.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Mr Galgut said: “I’m not used to winning things... and I just assumed that would be the case last night.
“Perhaps nobody was more amazed than me when things went my way.”
According to the prize organisers: “The Promise is set in South Africa during the country’s transition out of apartheid, explores the interconnected relationships between the members of a diminishing white family through the sequential lens of four funerals. The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel and first in seven years; his debut was published when he was just 17.”
Critics have noticed that his portrayal of South Africa was at times not a pleasant one The author told reporters at the ceremony: “I had no agenda in describing it that way, but things are not great with us right now, so you could read that as a warning or a portrait, I don’t know. “But South Africa has seen better days.” Despite not being optimistic about the current plight of his country, Mr Galgut praised the committee’s decision to recognise an African book, telling reporters: “The fact that the Nobel Prize winner this year came from Africa, the fact that the Booker has gone to an African, would suggest that the volume is going up on Africa. “I hope that’s a process that will continue and that people will take African writing a little more seriously, because there’s a lot of great writing coming from us.