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Booker Prize 2021: Damon Galgut's The Promise wins the prestigious literary award

3 November 2021

The Promise by Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize. Presenting the award, the chair of the judging panel Maya Jasanoff praised the book as having an "incredible originality and fluidity of voice". Read on to find out more about this as well as the other five shortlisted works.

Damon Galgut - The Promise

Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice before for previous novels The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room.

His latest novel, The Promise, explores recent South African history through the wish of a white woman to leave a house to a black woman who had worked for her. Rebecca Jones from 麻豆社 News described it as "beautifully written with characters you come to care deeply about".

  • on the Booker Prizes website

More on The Promise

The other shortlisted books and authors were:

  • Anuk Arudpragasam - A Passage North
  • Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
  • Nadifa Mohamed - The Fortune Men
  • Richard Powers - Bewilderment
  • Maggie Shipstead - Great Circle

Anuk Arudpragasam - A Passage North

Anuk Arudpragasam has been nominated for the 2021 Booker Prize for his second novel, A Passage North.

The book follows Krishan's journey as he travels across Sri Lanka to attend a family funeral and was described by Jenny Bhatt on NPR as a "" to those caught up in the country's civil war where an estimated 100,000 people were killed and 20,000 people remain missing.

  • on the Booker Prizes website

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Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This

Having previously written two collections of poetry and a memoir, No One is Talking About This is Patricia Lockwood's debut novel.

The stylistically experimental book explores human experiences on social media. Writing in The New York Times, Merve Emre praised the book for transforming "all that is ugly and cheap about online culture into ".

  • on the Booker Prizes website

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Nadifa Mohamed - The Fortune Men

While The Fortune Men is a novel, it is based on the true story of the wrongful murder conviction of Mahmood Mattan, the last man to be hanged in Wales in 1952.

David Lloyd, writing in Nation Cymru, called the book, Mohamed's third, a ", drawing on a huge injustice".

  • on the Booker Prizes website

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Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Richard Powers | Image: Dean D Dixon

Richard Powers won one of literature's other major awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his previous novel, The Overstory.

In Bewilderment, Powers tells the story of astrobiologist Theo Byrne who is struggling to raise his son Robin after the death of his wife.

Susannah Butter declared the book, Powers' 13th novel, to be ", original and moving" in her Evening Standard review.

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Maggie Shipstead - Great Circle

Maggie Shipstead's novel Great Circle weaves together the story of a trailblazing female aviator who disappeared in 1950 with that of a contemporary Hollywood star trying to make a film about her.

Writing in The Guardian, Stephanie Merritt called the book, which is Shipstead's third, "".

  • on the Booker Prizes website

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The six films featured above were produced by 麻豆社 New Creatives Yero Timi-Biu, Liam Young and Christine Ubochi. This scheme, supported by Arts Council England and 麻豆社 Arts, gives emerging artists the chance to produce innovative new short films, audio and interactive works from young artists.

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