Critical Perspectives on Damon Galgut

When Damon Galgut won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Promise in 2021, he was already an established writer. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010 and had been the author of eight novels and four plays, but before the success of The Promise, he remained relatively unknown to the general public outside South Africa. This volume is an attempt to engage an international set of specialists in postcolonial studies, South African literature, and, in several cases, established writers themselves, in a debate devoted entirely to Galgut’s novels. This publication demonstrates that Galgut’s work exceeds what readers tend to expect from post-apartheid white writing. Rather than offering the standard narratives of guilt, despair, and frustration, Galgut’s novels, in dialogue with each other, and in dialogue with cultural and philosophical trends, propose a more intricate fabric. The writer’s diagnosis of the human condition ultimately seems to transcend the constitutive turmoil and the crises, offering a vision of surprisingly and fascinatingly complex reality.