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 (born 12 November 1963) is a famous South African writer. 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 on 12 November 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa. When he was six years old, he became very ill.

He went to Pretoria Boys High School and was the top student, known as the head boy, in 1981. After high school, he studied drama at the University of Cape Town.

Writing Career

Galgut wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was only 17 years old. This was in 1982. Later, in 1988, he released a collection of short stories called Small Circle of Beings. One of these stories is about a mother dealing with her son's illness.

His novel The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991) won an award in 1992. Another novel, The Quarry (1995), was even made into a movie in 1998. A second movie version came out in 2020.

After his fifth novel, The Good Doctor, was published in 2003, more people around the world started to notice Galgut's writing. This book is about two very different people working in a hospital in rural South Africa, after the time of apartheid (a system of racial separation). The Good Doctor was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003. It also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in Africa that year.

His novel In a Strange Room was nominated for the 2010 Booker Prize. Critics praised it for its amazing descriptions of places. His 2014 novel, Arctic Summer, tells a fictional story about the life of the English novelist E. M. Forster. This book was also nominated for an award called the Walter Scott Prize.

Damon Galgut's novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. This made him the third writer from South Africa to win this big award. The book's main idea is about time. Galgut got the idea from a friend who told him about attending funerals for all his family members.

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

About His Life

Galgut has lived in Cape Town since the early 1990s. He loves to travel. He wrote a lot of The Good Doctor while staying in a hotel in Goa, India. He is very interested in yoga. For a while, he didn't even own a car or a television.

Galgut prefers to write his first two drafts by hand in notebooks. He uses a special tortoiseshell Parker fountain pen that he has had since he was about 20 years old. After writing by hand, he then types his work onto a computer. He says that the Roald Dahl short story "Pig" had a big influence on his writing style.

Awards and Honours

His Books and Plays

Novels

• A Sinless Season (1982)
• Small Circle of Beings (1988)
• The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991; won an award in 1992)
• 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