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Booker Prize goes to novel about a South African Jewish mother’s dying wish

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Published: 9 November 2021

Last updated: 4 March 2024

Author Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise is centred around the mother of a white farm-owning clan who insists that the family’s Black maid inherit the house she lives in

Booker Prize goes to novel about a South African Jewish mother’s dying wish (JTA)
The prestigious Booker Prize for fiction has gone to a South African’s novel about a Jewish woman’s dying wish.

Author Damon Galgut picked up the £50,000 ($A90,000) prize at a ceremony on Wednesday in London. The Promise spans 40 years of recent South African history, and kicks off when the mother of a white farm-owning clan insists that the family’s Black maid inherit the house she lives in — despite apartheid laws preventing Blacks from owning property.

The mother in the novel returns to her Jewish roots after converting to her husband’s evangelical Christian faith. In a review of The Promise, the Jewish Chronicle noted that “Galgut’s descriptions of Jewish observance are impressively detailed, and Judaism comes off well compared with other religious and spiritual traditions that feature in the novel”.

The Promise is the ninth book by Galgut, 57. The chair of the judging committee, Maya Jasanoff, described it as “a tour de force.”

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Author Hilma Wolitzer lost her husband to Covid, so at 91, she wrote a story about it (LA Times)
At the age of nine, Hilma Wolitzer published a poem in a journal sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation. Then she took a 35-year hiatus, publishing her next work at 44. “My pen name was ‘The Great Middle-Aged Hope,’” Wolitzer, now 91, told me recently, as wry as she and her writing have always been.

The occasion for our email conversation is the release of her 14th book, the story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. Many of these pieces were first published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. The final story, written just before the book went into production, is a wrenching reflection of Wolitzer’s greatest loss.

Photo: South African author Damon Galgut, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction, at the 2021 Booker Prize Awards Ceremony, November 3 (EPA)

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