Booker Prize rewards South African Author Damon Galgut

Covering the period from the end of the apartheid to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, his book, “The Promise”, traces, the progressive dislocation of a white family of Pretoria while the country emerges towards the Democracy.

Le Monde with AFP

The South African Author Damon Galgut won Wednesday 3 November The Booker Prize, prestigious British literary prize for The Promise, a book on the time that passes for a family of white farmers in South Africa post- apartheid.

The President of the Jury, the Historian Maya Jasanoff, emphasized the “originality [and] fluidity of the incredible” of the work, “a dense book, with a historical and metaphorical significance”.

“I am deeply, humbly grateful,” said the 57-year-old winner, finalist for the third time Booker Prize. Obviously moved, he praised a “great year for African writing”, marked by the Nobel Prize for Abdulrazak Gurnah Literature, British born in Zanzibar, and the Goncourt 2021 Award to the Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. “It’s a process that will continue”, and “people will take African writing a little more seriously,” Damon Galgut warned at a press conference, “there is a lot of great writing that comes from us “.

A story about the passage of time

By receiving the price, Damon Galgut, who was part of the favorites among the six finalists, pointed out that he wanted to accept it for “all the stories that were told and those who were not”, Writers, recognized or not, “of this remarkable continent”.

Covering the end of the apartheid until the presidency of Jacob Zuma, his book, the promised, retraces, over a series of burials, the progressive dislocation of a white family of Pretoria While the country emerges towards democracy.

In a video broadcast before the announcement of the result, the author explained that he wanted to show in this book “the passage of time and what he does to the family, what he does to politics the country and what it does to justice “. If a message was to remember, “it would be that mortality is what underlies all our lives”, “we all get older, and everything changes as time passes”.

A reward of 55,000 euros

Retranspise on the BBC, the ceremony brought together all the finalists in person – after video conferencing appearances during the previous edition, due to the restrictions related to the Pandemic due to COVID-19.

The six books used for the final had been selected by the five jurors among 158 novels published in the United Kingdom or Ireland between the 1 ER October 2020 and September 30, 2021. American Patricia Lockwood, Listing for No One Is Talking About This (which tells a tragedy caused by “absurdity” social networks), as well as two of his compatriots: Richard Powers (Bewilderment, in which an astrobiologist escapes towards fantastic worlds while holding his disturbed son) and Maggie Shipstead (Great Circle, which causes readers to the intertwined courses of an aviator of the XX e century and a Hollywood star of the XXI e century). The other finalists were the writer Srilankais Anuk Arudpragasam, 33, with Passage North, who evokes trauma and souvenirs of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and the British Somali norda Mohamed, 40, for The Fortune Men, which rests On the true story of a Somali unjustly condemned and executed for the murder of a woman in the port of Cardiff, Wales, in 1952.

Last year, the price had been attributed to the Scottish Douglas Stuart for his first novel, shuggie bath, which takes place in a family of the working class, in Glasgow, prey to alcoholism and the poverty in the 1980s.

Launched in 1969, the Booker Prize rewards each year the author of the “Best Roman written in English”. The winner wins a reward of 50,000 pounds (about 55,000 euros) and the insurance of international renown.

/Media reports.