Congratulations to Damon Galgut who has been named the winner of this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Promise.

The Promise is set in South Africa during the country’s transition out of apartheid, explores the interconnected relationships between the members of a diminishing white family through the sequential lens of four funerals. The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel and first in seven years; his debut was published when he was just seventeen.

Maya Jasanoff, 2021 chair of judges, comments: ‘The Promise astonished us from the outset as a penetrating and incredibly well-constructed account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its aftermath. On each reading we felt that the book grew. With an almost deceptive narrative economy, it offers moving insights into generational divides; meditates on what makes a fulfilling life—and how to process death; and explores the capacious metaphorical implications of “promise” in relation to modern South Africa.‘

Galgut was shortlisted alongside Maggie Shipstead (Great Circle), Richard Powers (Bewilderment), Nadifa Mohamed (The Fortune Men), Patricia Lockwood (No One is Talking About This) and Anuk Arudpragasam (A Passage North).

The Booker Prize for Fiction is a £50,000 prize literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. You can read more about the prize here.