London, November 4 (BNA) South African writer and playwright Damon Galgot won the Booker Prize on Wednesday for his novel “The Promise,” which revolves around the failure of a white family in their commitment to giving their black maid their own home.
This is Galgot’s third nomination for the £50,000 ($68,175) English Literature Prize, Reuters reported.
“It took me a long time to get here, and now that I feel like it, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t be here,” he said in his acceptance speech.
“This has been a great year for African writing and I would like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and not told writers have heard and unheard of from the wonderful continent of which I am a part. Please keep listening to us, there is so much to come” .
Beginning in the mid-1980s and setting off out of Pretoria, The Promise shifted across several decades and South African presidents.
Narrated through four family funerals, it begins with a young girl hearing her father promise her dying mother that their maid will transfer the titles to the annex she lives in—something she later retracts.
“The Promise amazed us from the start as an insightful and well-built account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its aftermath. We felt on every reading that the book grew,” historian Maya Jasanoff, presiding judge in a statement.
Through an almost illusory narrative economy, he offers moving insights into the divisions between generations; reflects on what makes life satisfying – and how to cure death; and explores the broad allegorical implications of ‘promise’ in relation to modern South Africa.
Galgot, who wrote his first novel at the age of 17, follows in the footsteps of previous South African Booker Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.
He was nominated for the Booker Prize twice before: in 2003 for “The Good Doctor” and in 2010 for “In a Strange Room”.