Written in an innovative style, The Promise tells the story of a white South African family through the device of four funerals over 40 years, chronicling the decline of post-apartheid South Africa. Slight in person (he’s a committed yogi), the 57-year-old author is serious and courteous in conversation, but the sardonic voice of the novel’s shapeshifting, puckish narrator clearly belongs to him. Obviously it was a great night for the book, so it is hard to be displeased with that.” The ceremony last night felt totally unreal, he says, “as if I’d been hit over the head. He finds the whole thing “deeply disquieting” (his mother has helpfully given his contact details to journalists back in South Africa). He has been shortlisted twice before: in 2003 for The Good Doctor, and in 2010 for In a Strange Room.
“I’m used to not winning – that’s kind of what I’m programmed for, and what I’m braced for,” says the quietly spoken South African novelist Damon Galgut, the morning after he was awarded the Booker prize for his ninth novel, The Promise.
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