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Damon Galgut Books In Order

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

A Sinless Season (1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
Small Circle of Beings (1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Quarry (1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Good Doctor (2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Impostor (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
In a Strange Room (2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
Arctic Summer (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Promise (2021)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Anthologies

The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories(1997)Description / Buy at Amazon
Writing on the Edge(2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
Touch: Stories Of Contact(2010)Description / Buy at Amazon

Damon Galgut is a South African literary fiction author who made his debut as a seventeen year old when he wrote the novel “A Sinless Season.” He was the son of a Jewish father and a converted mother who grew up with lymphoma.

He went to Pretoria Boys High School and graduated in 1981 before proceeding to the University of Cape Town where he majored in drama.

The novelist and playwright has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for literature three times before The Promise which is his ninth novel won it in 2021. Besides the Booker Prize, he is also a multi award winning author who has had several of his works adapted into films.

While he was born and bred in Pretoria, he now makes his home in Cape Town from where he writes his novels. Asked why he decided to pursue a career as an author he has said that it was all because of lymphoma.

He has said that, suffering from lymphoma,he learned to associate stories and books with a particular type of comfort and attention.

Just like many authors, Damon Galgut has been inspired and influenced by several authors over the years. However, there are too many to list, even though the spirit of a great many of them have hung over him while he pens his works.

One of the most influential of these is William Faulkner, who she started reading when she was very young. He has also been influenced though to a lesser extent by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick White.

The author penned “A Sinless Season” while he was a seventeen year old in 1982. He then followed that with “Small Circle of Beings” which was a collection of short stories. Damon Galgut won the 1992 Literary Award by the Central News Agency for his novel “The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs.”

Several of his novels have also been made into feature films. In addition to writing some blockbuster literary fiction, he has also been known to write some very popular short fiction works.

As for his personal life, Galgut is openly gay and this is somthign reflected in his works. He tends to focus a lot on male-male relationships in his works and has said that he was influenced to such writing from reading “Pig” the short story by Roald Dahl.

The author has been living in Cape Town for several decades now, even though he often travels out of South Africa. In fact he has written several of his novels including “The Good Doctor” while he was in India.

Galgut has often described himself as a man with an obsession with yoga and at some point, he did not have a television or a car. An interesting quirk about the author is that despite not liking the modern comforts in life, he has a life sized fetish when it comes to stationery.

In fact, he has been known to shun computers and typewriters as he prefers to write his stories in longhand before he types them up. Another weird thing is that he uses a Parker fountain pen made of tortoise shell, that he has owned since he was twenty years old.

Damon Galgut’s novel “The Promise” follows the crash and burn of a South African white family that made their home on a farm just outside the city of Pretoria. At the opening of the novel, The Swarts are coming together to attend the funeral of the matriarch.

Amor and Anton, who are part of the younger generation, hate everything the Swart family has always stood for. One of these is the false promise they made to the African American woman who has been employed by them for her whole adult life.

She has served them for years and was subsequently promised her own land and house, but the promise remains unfulfilled several decades later.
The narrator of the story shifts from the different characters as they grab at their dreams. All this happens as the country is moving away from old divisions to go towards a more fair society but the family risks being left behind if it does not change its ways.

It is a story of tender and sharp emotional truths from a diminished family that is at the threat of being left behind.

“In a Strange Room” by Damon Galgut tells the story of a youthful South African traveling through India, Africa and Greece. These are three journeys that take the protagonist across three continents as he speaks and lives with all manner of disparate people.

The three journeys happen years apart from each other and the only connecting thread among all of them is the lead. In the three journeys, he is alternately a guardian, love and follower. As such, he tells the stories from the perspectives of who he is and who he will become several years in the future.

He remains nameless for the first half of the novel and then his name comes out as Damon. Damon slips through the third and first person perspectives with grace as he tells a story with a ton of anxiety and tension.

In his first journey, he finds himself walking in Lesotho with a stranger who happens to be a German citizen. In the second work, he met a group of Swiss friends and the two journeyed across Africa. In the third story, he goes to India alongside a self destructive woman that he has difficulty handling.

Damon Galgut’s novel “The Good Doctor” is a story that follows two men who are hard at work in a near deserted rural hospital in South Africa. It is a very ambiguous story in which hardly anything ever happens.It is a book with a palpable and thick atmosphere that draws in its readers from the first page right to the last.

It introduces Frank Eloff, the deputy director of the hospital that has been working there for ages hoping to one day step up and be the top guy. He has been promised the move for years but has never gotten it.

At the beginning of the story, Laurence Waters is a new junior doctor at the hospital. He had insisted on getting posted to the location despite the fact that he knew there was hardly any work or patients to treat.

He is an endlessly hopeful and upbeat individual, who sometimes comes across as wilfully naive. But he comes with a sinister streak and Frank is uncomfortable at having to share a room with him.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Damon Galgut

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