The Promise

The Promise won the Booker Prize in 2021. Brutal emotional truths hit home in Damon Galgut’s deft, powerful story of a diminished family and a troubled land.

The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks, deliciously lethal in its observation of the crash and burn of a white South African family. On their farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation detests everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land, yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

Winner: The 2021 Booker Prize
Published by: Chatto & Windus
Publication date: 17 June 2021

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Damon Galgut

About the Author

Damon Galgut has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize and won in 2021 for his ninth book, The Promise. He is a South African playwright and novelist, who wrote his first novel aged 17.

More about Damon Galgut

The winning moment

Damon Galgut hears the winning announcement 2021

Damon Galgut reacts to the announcement that he has won the 2021 Booker Prize, at Broadcasting House Radio Theatre in London on November 3 2021.

© David Parry/PA

Winning author Damon Galgut with Maya Jasnaoff

Damon Galgut with Maya Jasnaoff, chair of the 2021 Booker Prize judges, after being named the winner of this year’s prize.

© David Parry/PA

Damon Galgut on stage at the 2021 Booker Prize awards ceremony, after being announced as the winner of the prize for his novel The Promise.

© David Parry/PA

Last year’s winner, Douglas Stuart presents the award to this year's winner Damon Galgut

The 2020 Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart presents the award to the 2021 winner Damon Galgut, at the Booker Prize awards ceremony in London on November 3 2021.

© David Parry/PA

Winning author Damon Galgut at the 2021 Booker Prize Awards Ceremony

The 2021 Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut, makes his acceptance speech at the ceremony in London on November 3 2021.

© David Parry/PA

Winning author Damon Galgut at the 2021 Booker Prize awards ceremony, with the specially bound edition of his novel.

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Winning author Damon Galgut at the 2021 Booker Prize Awards Ceremony.

© David Parry/PA

Let me say this has been a great year for African writing, and I'd like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent I'm part of. Please keep listening to us, there's a lot more to come

— Damon Galgut, accepting the Booker Prize, November 3 2021

The Promise hailed as a 'clear Booker winner'

Damon Galgut is ‘a vital, nuanced chronicler of the deep hurts of South Africa, past and present’, wrote Justine Jordan in the Guardian after he was announced as the winner of the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise. Galgut’s themes of ‘historical injustice and the legacy of colonial violence make The Promise a timely, urgent winner’, said Jordan. Read the full piece at the Guardian.

Damon Galgut’s layered feat of fiction is a clear Booker winner, the Guardian, November 3 2021

Watch: Damon Galgut and The Promise

Created in partnership with the BBC and Rural Media, ‘The Promise’ is directed by Christine Ubochi and stars David Jonsson.

Damon Galgut on his Booker Prize win

‘I’m not used to winning things,’ Damon Galgut told Martha Kearny on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on November 4, the morning after his Booker Prize win for The Promise. He continued: ‘Perhaps nobody was more amazed than me when things went my way.’

Damon Galgut - Best of Today, BBC Sounds, November 4 2021

The original idea came from a conversation with a friend, who’s the last surviving member of his family

Damon Galgut, Booker Prize Q&A, 2021

Listen to an extract from The Promise

Award-winning audiobook narrator Peter Noble brings Damon Galgut’s The Promise to life.

Penguin Books UK · The Promise - Extract

The cover of the audiobook for Damon Galgut's The Promise on an orange background.

In The Promise, Damon Galgut makes a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world?

Chigozie Obioma

The judges on The Promise

‘The Promise is an expansive family novel that explores the interconnected relationships between members of one family through the sequential lens of multiple funerals. Death assumes here both a closing but also an opening into lives lived. It is an unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century. In The Promise, Damon Galgut makes a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world? The novel’s way of tackling this question is what makes it an accomplishment and truly deserving of its place on the shortlist.’

Chigozie Obioma, 2021 Booker Prize judge

With The Promise, Galgut’s latest novel, he joins, indisputably, the ranks of other great South African writers

Paul Perry, Irish Independent, July 25 2021

Reading Guide: Ideas to explore

When reading The Promise, you could explore:

The ‘promise’ of the title is both a literal one and a figurative one about the characters’, or the country’s, potential. Can you explore that idea?
What do you make of the narrator’s voice: the way it shifts and swoops and becomes almost like a movie camera with its alternating perspectives?
How does the Swart family stand for what is happening more broadly in South Africa?
Discuss the supernatural elements of the book
Towards the end we are faced with the question, not only of whether the original promise can be kept, but whether it was a flawed promise all along. Where do you stand?

Cover of The Promise by Damon Galgut on an orange background.

Other nominated books by Damon Galgut

In a Strange Room

Damon Galgut’s haunting evocation of one man’s search for love and a place to call home - a novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion.