Booker winner Damon Galgut laments South Africa’s gloom

By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — South African author Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize for fiction on Nov. 3 for his novel “The Promise,” the story of a white South African family in decline in the years before and after the end of the racist apartheid system. It caps a month in which African writers also won the Nobel Prize for Literature and France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. Galgut is happy to see African writers getting international recognition, but he’s gloomy about the state of South Africa. He tells The Associated Press his homeland is in “a state of moral exhaustion” amid a pandemic that has killed almost 90,000 South Africans and battered the economy.