Damon Galgut is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise and was shortlisted for the award in 2003 and 2010. Galgut was born on 12 November 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father was from a Jewish family and his mother converted to Judaism. At the age of six, he was diagnosed with lymphoma.
Galgut wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1982), when he was 17. His novel In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize for fiction. Galgut's novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize making him the third writer from South Africa to win the Booker, following Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, who has won twice.
Real obsession needs an unconscious motivation behind it. Damon Galgut
I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India. Damon Galgut
For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise. Damon Galgut
The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear. Damon Galgut
Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives. Damon Galgut
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. Damon Galgut
Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out. Damon Galgut
No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight. Damon Galgut
It is always an attractive moment when curiosity takes hold. Damon Galgut
How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed. Damon Galgut
There are many monsters, oh, many! Damon Galgut
Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. Damon Galgut
Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory. Damon Galgut
Past a certain point, maybe, a person's character defines itself and stays fixed in your mind. Damon Galgut
No love left, only kindness. Damon Galgut
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. Damon Galgut
Odd how certain people, often random individuals, can pulse with significance in your thoughts, your dreams. Damon Galgut
What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence? Damon Galgut
To be honest and to be fair were not always the same thing. Damon Galgut
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me. Damon Galgut
