Third time lucky for Damon

The 2021 Booker Prize has been won by Damon Galgut for his novel The Promise. Damon won the £50,000 Prize for his ninth novel, the story of a white South African family and the end of Apartheid. He had been nominated for the Booker twice before, for The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010).

Maya Jasanoff, the chair of the judges, said, ‘We felt among the judges that this book really is a tour de force. It combines an extraordinary story with rich themes – the history of the last forty years in South Africa – in an incredibly well-wrought package. Before we even started talking about the individual titles, we had a more wide-ranging discussion about what it is we feel makes a book a winner. One of the judges drew a distinction between the very good and the great. For me, The Promise manages to pull together the qualities of great storytelling – it’s a book that has a lot to chew on – with remarkable attention to structure and literary style. With each reading of this book, it revealed something new.’

The novel unfolds over the course of four funerals, each taking place in a different decade, and Damon said that working on a film script encouraged him to adopt a more cinematic style of writing, noting that “the narrator could behave like a camera, moving in close and then suddenly pulling far back, jumping from one character to another in the middle of a scene, or even a sentence, or following some side-line of action that has nothing to do with plot.

‘In film, the point-of-view jumps and changes all the time – why not in a novel? I was very excited by the realisation, because it freed me from the strictures of tradition, and allowed me to give free rein to the cacophony of voices that seem always to be jostling inside, wanting to be heard.”