Damon Galgut wins 2021 Booker Prize for ‘The Promise’

Damon Galgut was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel “The Promise.”

Published in April by Europa Editions, the novel is set near Pretoria, South Africa, and tells the story of three siblings who lose touch after the death of their matriarch. Over the next three decades, they are brought together again by four funerals, and along the way they reflect on the resentments and hopes of their home country as the former apartheid state evolves.

“It’s taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn’t be here,” said Galgut, who was previously shortlisted for the prestigious British prize, in his acceptance speech. “This could just as easily have gone to any of the other amazing talented people on this list and a few others who aren’t.

“But seeing as the good fortune has fallen to me, let me say this has been a great year for African writing,” the South African writer continued. Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature.

“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.”

This year’s winner was chosen by historian and judging panel chair Maya Jasanoff; writer and editor Horatia Harrod; actor Natascha McElhone; twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma; and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams.

The ceremony included a recorded conversation between Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and Scottish author Douglas Stuart, last year’s Booker Prize winner for his debut novel, “Shuggie Bain,” about the life of a kind, lonely boy growing up in public housing in 1980s Glasgow, Scotland. And during the event, BBC writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed interviewed Stuart along with poet and novelist Ben Okri, the 1991 Booker Prize winner for “The Famished Road.”

The Booker Prize is the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. Once limited to novelists living in the British Commonwealth, since 2013 it has been open to any novel written in English and published in the U.K.

Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.

Below is the complete 2021 Booker Prize shortlist: