The South African novelist and playwright Damon Galgut will be in conversation with the American journalist Diane Rehm in January of next year. This comes after Galgut was announced winner of the Booker Prize last month, for his novel The Promise, making him the fifth African and third South African to receive the $50,000 award.
Diane Rehm is the host of the podcast Diane Rehm: On My Mind, produced at American University’s radio station, WAMU. The conversation will last an hour and will centre on The Promise and Damon Galgut’s experience and childhood during and after Apartheid in South Africa.
Galgut is the author of A Sinless Season (1982), Small Circle of Beings (1988), The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), The Quarry (1998), The Impostor (2008), and Artic Summer (2014). His novels, The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010), were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the former won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa Region).
The Promise (2021), his ninth novel, spans decades and tells the story of the Swarts, a white family in post-Apartheid South Africa, and their contention with an unkept promise to their Black domestic servant Salome.
The New Yorker praised the novel’s “beautifully peculiar narration” and 2021 Booker Prize judge Chigozie Obioma said the novel “balances a kind of Faulknerian exuberance with a Nabokovian precision.”
The virtual event will be held on Zoom and welcomes participants.
It is set for 2:15 PM ET on Wednesday, January 26, 2021.
The deadline for registration is January 26, at 12PM ET.
Register here.
