Damon Galgut, the Man Booker Prize Winner of 2021

Damon Galgut, the South African playwright and novelist was born on 12 November, 1963. He is awarded the 2021 Booker prize for his novel The Promise, making Galgut the third South African to win the prize. The novel charts the crash and burns of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The younger generation detest everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the black women who has worked for them her whole life. The Promise hit home by pointing out the sharp, tender and emotional truths of the family. Damon Galgut expressed his humble gratitude for the Man Booker prize.

Galgut is gay and has stated that this leads him to focus on male oriented relationships in his writings. He studied drama at the university of Cape Town, when he wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984). His novel, The Good Doctor (2003), set in post apartheid South Africa explores the uneasy friendship between two very different men in a deserted rural hospital. Galgut's best known novel is The Good Doctor, for which he was shortlisted for both the Man Booker prize for fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Reading Damon Galgut is not a comfortable process. Galgut has found a compelling way of dealing with complex situations, and the weight of politics and history.

Dheena. P

II BA Functional English 

Al Shifa College of Arts and Science Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna