Booker Prize winners announced for 2021 – Northampton College Libraries

Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction with his novel The Promise.

The announcement was made by Maya Jasanoff, chair of the 2021 judges, in a ceremony that was broadcast live to a global audience of millions by the BBC.

The Promise is set in South Africa during the country’s transition out of apartheid, explores the interconnected relationships between the members of a diminishing white family through the sequential lens of four funerals. The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel and first in seven years; his debut was published when he was just seventeen.

Meanwhile, David Diop, a French writer and academic, won the prize for the International version of the prize with his unsettling tale of two Senegalese soldiers fighting in the trenches of the First World War.

Diop, who is half-Senegalese, spent much of his childhood in Dakar and was inspired to write At Night All Blood is Black by the lack of historical information around the many African soldiers who fought and died for France in the war. As an academic, Diop specialises in 18th century literature, and his novel, in which a soldier is unhinged by the death of his comrade, weaves in old European racial stereotypes of African savagery.

At Night All Blood is Black is already available to borrow from the Library, click here to view it on the catalogue. The Promise will be available to borrow in the coming months. In the meantime, click the images below for more information on the winning titles.