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. (Tolga Akmen/AFP) 304pp, ₹699 Penguin Random House Damon Galgut in London on October 31, 2021. 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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