Der Literarische Salon mit Damon Galgut

Based on a single family, Damon Galgut, born in Pretoria in 1963, tells the story of South Africa's development, from the apartheid regime to the present day. But the way he does it, polyphonic, ambiguous, full of unforgettable nuances and linguistically simply brilliant, makes this story a universal metaphor of oppression and racial hatred, resistance and forgiveness: "The Promise" is the novel of our time and its author one of the most important voices in world literature. William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf are still the most common comparisons drawn to mark the South African author's rank, and rarely has the word "deserved" been read so often after the Booker Prize was awarded as it was in 2021, when "The Promise" received the world's most prestigious award for a novel. "Damon Galgut is the third South African Booker Prize winner after J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer," Lothar Müller noted in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "And he is equal to the tradition he is entering."