Damon Galgut facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Damon Galgut
Galgut in 2013
Born	(1963-11-12) 12 November 1963 (age 61) Pretoria, South Africa
Occupation	Novelist playwright
Education	Pretoria Boys High School; University of Cape Town
Genre	Drama, fiction, short stories
Notable works	The Good Doctor (2003) The Promise (2021)
Notable awards	Booker Prize (2021)

Damon Galgut was born on November 12, 1963. He is a famous writer from South Africa. He writes both novels and plays. In 2021, he won the important Booker Prize for his novel The Promise. He had been nominated for this award two times before, in 2003 and 2010.

Early Life and School

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria, South Africa. When he was six years old, he became sick with a type of cancer called lymphoma.

He went to Pretoria Boys High School. He was even the head boy there, which means he was a leader among the students. After high school, he studied drama at the University of Cape Town.

His Writing Career

Damon Galgut started writing very young. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was only 17 years old. This book came out in 1982.

His next book was a collection of short stories called Small Circle of Beings. It was published in 1988. One story in it talks about a mother dealing with her son's illness.

Award-Winning Books

In 1991, his novel The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs won the Central News Agency Literary Award. Another novel, The Quarry (1995), was even made into two movies. The first movie came out in 1998, and a second one was released in 2020.

His fifth novel, The Good Doctor, was published in 2003. This book helped him become well-known outside South Africa. It tells the story of two very different people in a hospital in rural South Africa. Critics really liked The Good Doctor. It was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003. It also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in Africa that same year.

More Famous Novels

Galgut's novel In a Strange Room was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2010. A famous writer named Jan Morris said it was a "beautiful" book. She also said it had amazing descriptions of places.

His 2014 novel, Arctic Summer, is about the life of another famous writer, E. M. Forster. It focuses on Forster's time in India and Alexandria. This novel was also nominated for the Walter Scott Prize.

Winning the Booker Prize

Damon Galgut's novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. This made him the third writer from South Africa to win this major award. The other winners were Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. Galgut has said that the main idea of The Promise is about time. He got the idea from a friend who was the last person left in his family. His friend told him about attending the funerals of his mother, father, brother, and sister.

Besides novels, Damon Galgut has also written several plays. He was working on a new collection of short stories when he won the Booker Prize.

About His Life

Damon Galgut has said that his writing often focuses on relationships between men. He also shared that a short story by Roald Dahl called "Pig" greatly influenced his writing.

He has lived in Cape Town, South Africa, since the early 1990s. He loves to travel and wrote much of The Good Doctor while staying in a hotel in Goa, India. He is very interested in yoga. For a while, he did not even own a car or a television. Galgut enjoys using special stationery. He writes his first two drafts by hand in notebooks. Then, he types them on a computer. He has used the same tortoiseshell Parker fountain pen since he was about 20 years old.

Awards and Honors

His Works

Novels

• A Sinless Season (1982)
• Small Circle of Beings (1988)
• The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991)
• The Quarry (1995)
• The Good Doctor (2004)
• The Impostor (2008)
• In a Strange Room (2010)
• Arctic Summer (2014)
• The Promise (2021)

Plays

• Echoes of Anger (1983)
• Party for Mother
• Alive and Kicking
• The Green's Keeper

See also

In Spanish: Damon Galgut para niños