Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut was born on 12 November 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa, from a Jewish family. Diagnosed with lymphoma at age six, he attended Pretoria Boys High School, where he was head boy, before studying drama at the University of Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, at seventeen in 1982. Openly gay and living in Cape Town, he is one of South Africa's most internationally celebrated novelists. His international recognition grew with The Good Doctor (2003), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He was further shortlisted for the Booker for In a Strange Room (2010). He won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, a novel tracing a white South African family across four decades through a series of deaths, becoming the third South African to win the Booker after Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee.