The Booker 2021, one of the most prestigious British literary awards for English-language writers, goes to South African Damon Galgut, 59-year-old novelist and playwright. Galgut - already nominated for Booker in 2003 and 2010, when he was shortlisted but failed to win - was awarded for the novel 'The Promise'.
Son of the white bourgeoisie of Pretoria, born in a family of European origins, he has a long career behind him which began very young and tells of having developed the idea of writing since he was a child, during his convalescence for the treatment of a cancer diagnosed in only 6 years old.
"It has been a long way to get here", he commented after the announcement, "and now that I am there I am aware that I should not be there".
"This award could have easily gone to one of the other formidable talented authors nominated or to someone who was not on the shortlist," Galgut flipped, not without pointing out how this one - from the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah, to the French Goncourt awarded today to Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - "it has been a great year for African fiction ... for the extraordinary continent to which I belong".
A continent that he invited to "listen more, because it has much more to give".