Damon Galgut, South African Author Awarded Booker Prize 2021 For His Book 'The Promise'

"It's taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn't be here," added the author, who wrote his first novel aged 1.

New Delhi: The South African author Damon Galgut, has been awarded the Booker Prize 2021 for the book "The Promise" under fiction on Wednesday.  

"I am really profoundly, humbly grateful for this," the 57-year-old novelist and playwright said as he accepted the prestigious British award at a televised ceremony in London.

"It's taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn't be here," added the author, who wrote his first novel aged 17 reported AFP.

The winner who received a £50,000 ($68,000) prize was previously shortlisted for “The Good Doctor” in 2003 and “In a Strange Room” in 2010, but lost both times. The judges the book the judges called a “tour de force" gives a career-changing boost in sales and public profile.

The prize has previously been awarded to Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel. He is the third South African novelist to win the Booker Prize, after Nadine Gordimer in 1974 and J.M. Coetzee, who won twice, in 1983 and 1999.

In his acceptance speech, he said, "This has been a great year for African writing and I'd like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I'm part of," he said.

"Please keep listening to us. There's a lot more to come."

The Promise

The Promise", about a South African white family with a farm outside Pretoria. Galgut who also grew up in the same place said he wanted the novel to show how "the passing of time" impacts a family, a country, its politics and "notions of justice" while also exploring mortality.

The story is of a troubled Afrikaner family and its broken promise to a Black employee — a tale that reflects bigger themes in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.

According to an AP report, historian Maya Jasanoff, who chaired the judging panel, said, “This is a book that’s very much about inheritance and legacy,” she said of the winner. “It’s about change over a period of decades. And I think it’s a book that invites reflection over the decades and invites and repays rereading.”

“The Promise” was a profound, forceful and succinct book that “combines an extraordinary story, rich themes -- the history of the last 40 years in South Africa -- in an incredibly well-wrought package", she said.

Other finalists

“The Promise” was selected over five other novels, including three by U.S. writers: Richard Powers’ “Bewilderment,” the story of an astrobiologist trying to care for his neurodivergent son; Patricia Lockwood’s social media-steeped novel “No One is Talking About This” and Maggie Shipstead’s aviator saga “Great Circle.”

The other finalists were Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s aftermath-of-war story “A Passage North” and British/Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed’s “The Fortune Men,” about a Somali man falsely accused of murder in 1950s Wales.