Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut laments South Africa's gloom

"Really, the transformation that needs to take place is not only in Western publishing - it’s also in Africa itself,” said Galgut, citing a dearth of publishers and booksellers. "I would like African governments to start taking their own artists seriously.” Photo: AFP

South African author Damon Galgut has mixed feelings. This has been a great few weeks for him, a good month for African writers - and a terrible year, he says, for his country, blighted by pandemic and corruption.

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.