South African writer Damon Galgut has emerged winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction with The Promise, a novel about one white family’s reckoning with South Africa’s racist history.
Announed winner Wednesday, Time magazine reports that Galgut had been British bookmakers’ runaway favourite to win the 50,000-pound ($69,000) prize with his story of a troubled Afrikaner family and its broken promise to a Black employee—a tale that reflects bigger themes in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.
Galgut took the prize on his third time as a finalist, for a book the judges called a “tour de force.” He was previously shortlisted for The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010, but lost both times.
Despite his status as favourite, Galgut said he was “stunned” to win.
