LONDON — Third time, as the saying goes, and for Damon Galgut it proved charmed. The South African novelist won the Booker Prize on Wednesday night for “The Promise”, after being shortlisted in 2003 and 2010. It is his ninth novel, and his country says it is the work he was always building towards.
The book traces a white South African family, the Swarts, across four decades through four funerals — each chapter a death — anchored by a promise made and repeatedly broken: that the family’s Black domestic worker, Salome, will be given the small house she has lived in all her life. The unkept promise becomes the moral X-ray of the nation itself, from late apartheid to the disappointments of the present.
Written in a restless, camera-like narration that drifts between characters without warning, “The Promise” was the critics’ favourite of the shortlist. The judges, chaired by historian Maya Jasanoff, called it a spectacular demonstration of the novel’s possibilities.
Galgut, 57, wrote the book in a state of dismay about South Africa’s direction, and the win arrives at a bleak moment for his country: pandemic damage, riots in July, rolling blackouts. In his speech he noted that the year’s theme seemed to be death — his novel opens at a funeral — but that the prize’s renewal was cause for hope.
He is the third South African winner, after Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee — the latter now with company as the only South African Booker laureates of the democratic era.
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