This year’s key prizes have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Damon Galgut, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Abdulrazak Gurnah and others explain what winning means to them
This has been a great year for African writing,” announced Damon Galgut, accepting the Booker prize earlier this month for his multilayered novel, The Promise, which tells the story of an Afrikaner family amid the political and social upheaval that followed the end of apartheid. “I’d like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard from the remarkable continent that I come from.”
It was not an overstatement. Galgut’s Booker win comes at the end of a year when many of the literary world’s major awards have been scooped by writers with origins and heritages in the countries of Africa. In June, David Diop’s second novel At Night All Blood Is Black, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis, won the International Booker prize, its visceral story inspired by the accounts of Senegalese riflemen’s experiences in the first world war. In the last few weeks, Senegal has again come to the fore, as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) won France’s Prix Goncourt, making its author the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to do so.
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