Damon Galgut on writing in a country where a book can cost half your monthly wage

Damon Galgut stands for a photo ahead of talking to the Korean press on the sidelines of the Seoul International Writers’ Festival on Sept. 11, 2026. (courtesy LTI)

 When translations of Korean books are nominated for the International Booker Prize, the original titles tend to work their way back up the domestic bestseller lists. But that’s not the case everywhere.

 The South African author Damon Galgut, who won the Booker Prize in 2021 for his novel “The Promise” after making the short list on three separate occasions since 2003, described a literary scene far different from Korea’s during his first visit to the country last week.

 “There’s not much value placed on literature at all in South Africa. When I won the Booker Prize, the government said nothing,” he said. “And I don’t think it was deliberate; I think they do not notice; books don’t register at all.”

 Speaking to the press at the Ara Art Center in Seoul’s Jongno District on Friday, the author went on to point out that South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at around 30%. 

“The unemployment rates especially among young people is [. . .], I think, between 15% and 60% among people younger than 30 years old,” he said. “Books are very expensive in South Africa. If you’re a poor person, it’s equivalent to maybe half of your monthly salary.”

 “I’m going to get angry about our government,” he said on the subject. “If the government was interested, they could subsidize publishing. They could remove VAT on imported books. They could take active steps to bring the price of books down. They could also invest in libraries so that poor communities could access books. But as I said, they’re not interested.”

 Galgut said that his income in South Africa is “mostly paid by middle-aged, middle-class white ladies, because they are the biggest readers.” This itself is perhaps a point of irony — Galgut’s works are heavy on politics and social issues, particularly “The Promise,” in which whiteness is the object of satire and criticism. 

The novel follows the Afrikaner Swart family over the course of 40 years in the wake of the death of its matriarch, Rachel, whose dying wish is to pass some of her property to her Black servant, and her husband and children’s refusal to abide by it. The four funerals that unfold as members of the family pass over the years show how the times have changed, yet the promise to Salome, the servant, goes unkept. 

 “This piece of land that’s promised to Salome — it’s not valuable land, and the house is not a beautiful house,” according to Galgut. 

Promises made by individuals (and society, and the state) fall by the wayside as one funeral follows after another. “Quite a few white South Africans were angry with me and my book,” he said. 

Galgut’s own grandfather was a judge on South Africa’s highest court. Even after apartheid was abolished in 1994, many white people in the country, as both beneficiaries and antagonists in the system, are “very reluctant to give up privilege and power,” he said. “I think a lot of people have no conscience at all about historical privilege.”

 Moreover, Galgut has focused on the fact that “even the good people in South Africa are still working a little bit with their own interests.”

The cover of the Korean edition of “The Promise.” (Literature & Thought, 2003)

In this way, the author views it as his mission to contend with the mainstream world that he finds himself in, and attempt to envision a future. But now young people in South Africa either can’t or don’t read books.  

Galgut’s visit to Korea was occasioned by his attendance at the 2026 Seoul International Writers’ Festival, organized by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, which runs through Wednesday. Even having attended a wide variety of literary events over the years, the author said that this was the furthest he’d come to give a book talk. 

Galgut became the third South African author to win a Booker, after Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer (who won the Booker in 1974 and the Nobel in 1991), and J.M. Coetzee (who won the Booker twice in 1983 and 1999, and the Nobel in 2003). He is best known for his novel “The Quarry” (1995), which was adapted into a film, as well as “The Good Doctor" (2003) and “In a Strange Room” (2010), both of which were short-listed for the Booker Prize. 

He wrote his first novel while still in high school, which his English teacher sent to a publisher. This was during the height of apartheid, during a time when he said he butted heads with his grandfather, but still lacked political awareness. 

When asked when that changed, Galgut said that he became politically engaged at university. “We were in a state of emergency — South Africa officially declared a state of emergency and a number of other students with me were arrested and imprisoned. We got into student protests, and I got clubbed by the police.”

 “Until then, I think I was a product of a very, you can say, isolated and privileged upbringing,” he said. “And before that time, I had some idea that books didn't really have to be about dirty subjects like politics and some beautiful abstract realm of art where the real world is not very present.”

 He said that the first writing of his “attempting to engage with history and politics really came when I was about 25.”

 In “The Promise,” Galgut does not afford Salome, the Black maid with a (questionable) right to inherit property, a voice. Instead, she is treated as an object throughout the novel. 

“It was quite a controversial choice,” he said of the narrative decision. “Some people were very critical of me for doing that.”

“But if you come to South Africa now you will see millions of women exactly like Salome whose voice is completely unheard,” he said, saying that this was an attempt to show reality as it is, warts and all. “I want that to be uncomfortable for readers.”

“I find it very difficult and complicated to be a white South African in my own country,” the author went on. “I think we ought to feel far more guilty about the past than we do. Even though I did not create apartheid, I was still a beneficiary of that system.” 

“But for white South Africans like me, who, as I have tried to express, feel a lot of historical guilt, it is a great sadness that our government, in 30 years of democracy, has really changed very little,” Galgut opined. 

 Despite his family’s wishes for him to go into law, Galgut became a writer because he felt there was nothing that he would rather do. 

“I struggled for many years to make a living from writing,” he said. “Most writers I know are struggling in that way.”

Damon Galgut speaks on a panel at the Seoul International Writers’ Festival with writers Lee Seung-woo (right) and moderator and literary critic Ha Hyueok-jin (left) on Sept. 12, 2026. (courtesy LTI)

Asked what was better, hearing that he’d been shortlisted for the Booker or hearing that he’d won, his response appeared to intimate that though he was “destined” to become a writer, the road had been far from easy. 

“I will say that the moment I saw my name on the short list the first time, I felt my life jump from one track to another track. So actually that was probably the more significant moment of the two. I went from feeling unknown and invisible to feeling like I'm doing something that has a point,” he said. 

 But is there any hope for literature in South Africa? 

“When I was growing up, the feeling was you had to translate yourself for the world so the world could understand,” he said. “These days, I think, let the world come to South Africa. We are as important as any other place. It helps for the writer, I think, to think of themselves as being at the center of things. There was a time when the center was Europe, and I’m sure maybe there's the same feeling here in Korea.”