Barring South Africa and Nigeria, the two countries dominating international African writing, there are almost no publishers or booksellers in large parts of Africa. “You are pushing against the current in trying to promote writers here. He is saddened by the fact that there is no infrastructure in most African countries that could help promote good writing. Africa, he believes, never had the dearth of writing talent ever, but it certainly has missed the opportunity for its many voices to be heard. While it has brought him some cheer, he also wonders whether it’s a “sign of change” or random “fluke”. “It’s very interesting that Africans have swept the board with a whole host of major awards,” says Galgut. The 57-year-old author has a stroke of luck in a year that has proved to be a big moment for African fiction, with the Nobel Prize putting the global attention on the work of Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah. On both these occasions, as DBC Pierre and Howard Jacobson took home the award for their novels, Vernon God Little and The Finkler Question, Galgut went back to his world and got on with his life: “My life went my way.” When the Booker winner was announced early this month, it caught Galgut by surprise: “I didn’t think I would, but there it is. It’s not just the sort of technique that he is particularly drawn to,” says Galgut, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize for A Good Doctor (2003) and A Strange Room (2010). And I certainly don’t think he would have written a book remotely like The Promise. I don’t see myself as a writer similar to him. “It’s hard for me to understand why these comparisons keep getting made. Although Coetzee now lives in Australia, most of his early novels were set in the city of his birth. Galgut and Coetzee are both White men of a certain “tortured mindset,” writing out of Cape Town. But the constant clubbing of his works with others has left him exasperated.

He finds the novels of Coetzee and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer “exciting in different ways” and underlines that without them there is no way to write in the South African tradition. “I have been frustrated by these endless comparisons because it feels a little bit easy and lazy to me,” says Galgut in a video interview from Cape Town, where he lives. For long, well-meaning critics in the West have compared him to his compatriot JM Coetzee, who made history by becoming the first writer to have received the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999. Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize win for his portrayal of racism and injustice done to a Black maid by her Afrikaner employers in his ninth novel, The Promise, has kindled in him the hope that his work will stand on its own.

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