Damon Galgut receives the Pak Kyong-ni Prize in Wonju
The South African novelist and Booker winner is honoured in South Korea for his body of work.
Damon Galgut received the fifteenth Pak Kyong-ni Prize in Wonju, South Korea, on 29 October. Worth 100 million won, the international award considers a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single title. The judges described the South African author’s fiction as an inquiry into memory, responsibility and justice that reaches beyond its national setting. Galgut, who won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, emerged from an initial field of 165 writers that was later narrowed to twenty-six. Established in 2011 by the Toji Cultural Foundation in memory of Korean novelist Pak Kyong-ni, the prize creates a bridge between distant literary traditions and recognises the cumulative value of a career developed patiently, book by book.