Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize

Damon Galgut wins 2021 Booker Prize for fiction

It was third time lucky for the South African author, who was also shortlisted in 2003 and 2010. His book "The Promise" was the overwhelming favorite for the prize.

Date  3 October 2021
Author Stuart Braun

South African author Damon Galgut has won the £50,000 (€58,750) Booker Prize for "The Promise," beating out a quality field that included one other previously shortlisted author, Richard Powers.

The South African playwright and novelist wrote his first novel aged 17 and won the 2015 Sunday Times Fiction Prize for his eighth book, "Arctic Summer." 

"It's taken a long while to get here, and now I think that I shouldn't be here," Galgut said somewhat modestly, adding that he was "stunned" to win the award. He also dedicated the prize to all African writers. "I would like to accept this on behalf of all the stories ... that come from this wonderful continent," he said.

'The Promise' was a favorite for the prize

His latest novel narrates the story of a white South African farming family across four decades that are punctuated by a death in the clan. The matriarch's dying wish — or promise — is to gift a house on the property to the Black woman who has worked for the family her whole life. But the children are conflicted over whether to follow through on their mother's wish.

"Basically, apartheid’s dead and gone, but apartheid is still here," Galgut said in an interview with The Irish Timesabout the novel's underlying theme. "The laws of apartheid are not on the statute books anymore. But effectively, the economy keeps everyone more or less where they were."

Maya Jasanoff

'The legacies of the past'

During the ceremony at BBC’s Radio Theatre in London, the chair of the Booker Prize judges, historian Maya Jasanoff, said all six shortlisted novels "share a sense of innovation" and are "very immersive." The novels contained a "sense of the present ... by dealing with the legacies of the past," she added.

Speaking of Galgut's "The Promise," she said it combined "an extraordinary story, rich themes, the history of the last 40 years in South Africa, in an incredibly well-wrought package.''

The ceremony included a conversation between the 2020 winner Douglas Stuart — for "Shuggie Bain" — with the Duchess of Cornwall at Clarence House, the traditional encounter having been postponed because of the pandemic.

The BBC’s Samira Ahmed also interviewed Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, who won the Booker three decades ago in 1991 with "The Famished Road" and reflected on how the prize changed his life.

The other five authors shortlisted authors included US debut novelist Patricia Lockwood, Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam and British Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed. Here is a short introduction to their nominations for the 2021 Booker Prize.

Patricia Lockwood is the only debut novelist on the list

1. Patricia Lockwood

The US poet and writer is the only debut novelist on the 2021 shortlist, with "No One is Talking About This" also shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Having previously written two poetry collections, and the memoir "Priestdaddy," the contributing editor to the London Review of Books has penned a poignant drama of life in the internet age. The book tells the story of a social media guru who travels a world dominated by her existence on the internet, which she refers to as 'the portal.' Two urgent texts from her mother pierce the guru's bubble.

Nadifa Mohamed is the first British Somalian to make the shortlist

2. Nadifa Mohamed

The first British Somali novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Nadifa Mohamed's third novel, "The Fortune Men," is the harrowing fictionalized story of Mahmood Mattan, a father and petty thief who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952 — and the last man to be hanged in Cardiff Prison in Wales. When a shopkeeper is brutally killed, the accused Mahmood, a Somali immigrant, is secure in his innocence — until the trial nears and he comes face-to-face with a conspiracy and innate prejudices that will deal him the ultimate punishment. "I knew I wanted to make the line between fact and fiction imperceptible," said the author.

Richard Powers: The author of bestselling 'The Overstory' has been nominated for the second time for 'Bewilderment'

3. Richard Powers

The award-winning American author of 13 novels has been shortlisted twice for the Booker, and this year is in the running for "Bewilderment." After "The Overstory" made the list in 2018, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, "Bewilderment" details a special relationship between a scientist father and his loving son who wants to save the world but has just attacked a friend at school. Should the boy get medication? His father instead takes him on a journey into space to understand his own destructive planet. 

4. Anuk Arudpragasam

The Sri Lankan Tamil novelist, who studied in the US, is shortlisted for his second novel, "A Passage North." Arudpragasam was in the reckoning for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017 and his book, "A Passage North," is a story of coming to terms with life in the wake of the devastation wreaked by Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war. As Krishan makes the long trip by train from Colombo into a wartorn Tamil province in the north to attend a family funeral, so begins a journey into the scarred soul of a broken land.

Maggie Shipstead's third novel, 'Great Circle,' sees parallel worlds collide

5. Maggie Shipstead

The American novelist is shortlisted for her third novel, "Great Circle," which is set to follow the success of her 2012 debut novel, "Seating Arrangements" — a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize. "Great Circle" portrays the intersecting lives of a pioneering female aviator and the actress who portrays her on-screen decades later. When daredevil Marian Graves in 1950 sets off on her ultimate adventure, the Great Circle — a flight around the globe — she is never seen again. Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-ridden Hollywood actress, whose own parents perished in a plane crash, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves.

DW

Booker Prize / The Final Six

 

The Final Six

The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist tells of the persistence of grief, the deceptions of online prattle, the call of the wild, racial inequality and the triumph of the human spirit

 Nandini Nair  | 29 Oct, 2021

THE WINNER of the 2021 Booker Prize winner will be announced on November 3rd. The six shortlisted authors—Anuk Arudpragasam, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, Damon Galgut, Maggie Shipstead and Nadifa Mohamed—will gather in person for the ceremony.

This year’s jury included historian Maya Jasanoff, theological writer Rowan Williams, film and theatre actor Natascha McElhone, author Chigozie Obioma, and critic and editor Horatia Harrod. The judges read 158 books and engaged in passionate online discussions before deciding on the final six.

The winner of the 2021 Booker Prize will receive £50,000 and will see a tremendous increase in the sale of their winning novel. Authors who have won the Booker over the last 50 years say it has been “transformative” to their careers.

A Passage North | Anuk Arudpragasam

Hamish Hamilton | ₹ 599 | 304 pages

AnukArudpragasam’s novel is a favourite, amongst South Asian readers, to win this year’s Booker Prize, and for valid reasons. With his debut The Story of a Brief Marriage published in 2016, the Sri Lankan Tamil author had already gained the attention of critics and readers alike. The 33-year-old’s second novel proves that The Story of a Brief Marriage was no beginner’s luck, instead it was the foundation stone of Arudpragasam’s own canon. The Tamil cause informs his work, but his novels rise far above the political and are remarkable for their philosophical acuity.

In A Passage North the character Krishnan travels from Colombo to the Northern Province to attend his grandmother’s nurse’s funeral. Through the course of the novel, the reader journeys from the south of Krishnan’s mind to its own distant northern reaches. We come to know his grandmother’s life, from one of independence to a fraying of the self, which is the essence of old age. We learn of Rani the nurse and the tragedies that have assaulted her, and through her witness the aftermath of grief. We see Anjum the activist, Krishnan’s love interest who he befriends in Delhi and who will complete him and leave him bereft like no other.

This novel is remarkable for the number of things it gets precisely right; the landscape of the mind, the contours of grief, the fractures of relationships, the pitfalls of memory. And for ultimately being a novel that holds a reader’s attention and finds a place in the reader’s heart.

No One Is Talking about This | Patricia Lockwood

Bloomsbury | ₹ 503 (Kindle) | 205 pages

It is little surprise that No One Is Talking about This has a verse like quality to it. That is because 39-year-old Patricia Lockwood is best known as a poet. In July 2013, Lockwood’s prose poem “Rape Joke”, published on the website The Awl, became an online sensation. It tells of the rape of a 19-year-old girl by a man seven years older. Its honesty is hard-hitting. The American poet writes, “The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.”

With 104.5K Twitter followers, Lockwood is clearly a master of the pithy and dynamic line. Her book is very much about and aimed at the social media user and the compulsive scroller—essentially all of us.

The protagonist is an unnamed woman who Lockwood-like is known for her tweets, who lives her life in the “portal” (ie the World Wide Web) and is called upon to lecture about this universe. Lockwood’s own immersion in social media ensures that the book is packed with sharp insights on the machinations of the online world, such as, “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.” The first half of the book is driven by such observations on millennial life and times. Its fragmented nature feels like a newsfeed.

Patricia Lockwood is a master of the pithy and dynamic line. Her book is very much about, and aimed at, the social media user and the compulsive scroller—essentially all of us

The second half suddenly takes a turn toward the serious and tells of the protagonist’s sister’s pregnancy, which does not go as planned. The protagonist and sister go through a tide of emotions, as they learn that the baby might not live, and if she does, “she would live in her senses.”

In “Acknowledgements”, Lockwood writes of a rare genetic disorder Proteus Syndrome (think Elephant Man) and about her niece Lena: “you were not here to teach us, but we did learn.” For a reader, the book is thus a choppy ride, where in the first half one feels like one is sharing drinks with a witty and raucous friend and in the second half one is privy to a friend’s devastating loss.

Bewilderment | Richard Powers

Cornerstone | ₹ 494 (Kindle) | 278 pages

With 13 novels to his credit, Richard Powers is one of the most recognisable names on this shortlist. The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Bewilderment, like The Overstory, deals with the natural world and our place in it. Bewilderment, as the title suggests, takes the reader into the wild, and also asks whether we as humans have the capacity to treat it right.

The novel tells of a father dealing single-handedly with his neuro-atypical son after the sudden death of his wife in a car crash. Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist teaching at a university, grapples with professional demands while attending to Robin, who is prone to fits of rage. Robin not only deals with the natural world with curiosity and care, but is nearly obsessive in his inclinations. The father-narrator recounts a scene where the car he is driving accidentally hits a squirrel. “My son screamed. In the closed car, the sound turned wild, long and bloodcurdling, and it converged on the word Dad. He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door.”

In a bid to help his son without the use of psychoactive drugs, the father volunteers to sign him up for a medical experiment wherein his environmentalist wife’s brain can be mapped onto the nine-year-old’s. The reprieve they find through this experiment is immense but short-lived.

Powers is a fine writer and the book has some gem-like lines such as, “That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.” But the purpose of the book—an ode to the wild—often overwhelms the story. The novel would have benefitted from a little less didacticism.

The Promise | Damon Galgut

Vintage | ₹ 554 (Kindle) | 293 pages

Damon Galgut, a South African writer, has been shortlisted twice before for the Booker. For The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010. Apartheid and the socio-political conditions of South Africa have inked his novels.

His latest, The Promise, spans the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in South Africa, as it details the events following the death of a white matriarch whose wish is to give a humble house on the property to her black servant Salome. This is a time when “Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.” Can this “promise” of a house to the servant be fulfilled in a country riven by strife?

Set in Pretoria, it tells of the lives (and the deaths) of the Swart family consisting of Ma, Pa and the children, Anton, Astrid and Amor. The novel uses multiple points of view, and at times the reader is even addressed directly. For example, “If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked.”

In an interview to The Guardian Galgut said, “The personality of the narrator moves around—it’s one element that I hope slightly wrong-foots the reader into asking the question: who is telling the story? And the fact that that question is raised might be its only point.”

When Ma (Rachel) dies, both sides of the family the Jewish and non-Jewish, English-speaking and Afrikaans all come together. Creating the novel around funerals, it lays bare family resentments, bristling egos, accusations and allegations. The only certainty it reminds readers is death: “By tomorrow morning already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permanent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.”

Great Circle | Maggie Shipstead

Transworld | ₹ 400 (Kindle) | 576 pages

The final entry from the logbook of Marian Graves reads, “I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life… No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession. And yet, and yet, and yet.”

The American novelist Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle draws an arc between a fictional woman aviator Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter, an actress, playing Marian in a biopic titled Peregrine. Hadley is drawn to Marian because both had lost their parents, and were raised by their uncle. The novel is cinematic in scope as it recreates shipwrecks, and plane crashes, film stunts and feral childhoods. It is both about the history of aviation and the workings of Hollywood today.

At close to 600 pages, the book spans a century and traverses the globe. It is a big book with a big ambition. It opens with a map of a little plane circumnavigating the globe. Marian vanished in 1950, while attempting a north-south circumnavigation of the earth. Written as historical fiction, Marian is a composite character created from many “forgotten brave ladies of the sky”. While Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, may be the best known, she is remembered today more for her disappearance than her achievements. The history of women in aviation inspired Shipstead to write this book. Shipstead, a travel writer, travelled far and wide to flesh out these early feats of navigation, from Hawaii to Cook Islands and even Antarctica.

Telling the story of an aviator and an actress in different centuries, the book is ultimately one about female ambition and passion. It is about the triumph of an iron will against all odds, as a Rainer Maria Rilke verse in the book reminds one; “I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. / I may not complete this last one / but I give myself to it.”

The Fortune Men | Nadifa Mohamed

Viking | ₹ 799 | 384 pages

Forty-year-old Nadifa Mohamed is the first British Somali novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker.

Booker Prize judge Maya Jasanoff says of the book, “The Fortune Men demonstrates what historical fiction can achieve at its best—to get inside the head of the past—while implicitly yet urgently underscoring the present-day persistence of racism and injustice.”

Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel The Fortune Men is based on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor, and father of three young boys, who is hanged in Cardiff, wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952. In 1998 (45 years too late) his conviction and hanging was overturned.

Mahmood is a “quiet man, always appearing and disappearing silently, at the fringes of the sailors or the gamblers or the thieves” who “cares nothing for politics”. A cruel system is blind to who Mahmood truly is: “the tireless stoker, the poker shark, the elegant wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father.”

He is accused of killing a shopkeeper, Lily Volpert, here renamed Violet Volacki. He is at the movies at the time of the murder, but is still seen as guilty. Mahmood initially believes that the English justice system will stand by him. He tries to hold onto hope while in jail. But he slowly realises that it is just his word (and the truth) against false evidence, fake witness testimonies and institutionalised racial policing.

While telling a story of deep injustice, Mohamed also recreates the history of Somali ship workers in Wales who struggle for employment and dignity. At a time when the racial bias of police forces in the US and UK are being exposed this book has special significance. As Mahmood thinks to himself, “No end to the lies they tell to make a black man’s life hard.”

OPEN

Anuk Arudpragasam / The Wages of War

 

Anuk Arudpragasam

The Wages of War

The Sri Lankan novelist Anuk Arudpragasam, whose new book portrays the island after the civil war, speaks to Nandini Nair about the spectatorship of violence and the persistence of grief

 Nandini Nair  | 16 Jul, 2021

ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM’S A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton; 304 pages; Rs599) is a novel where nothing much happens yet everything happens. It begins with Krishan receiving a phone call from Rani’s daughter (Rani was his grandmother’s nurse) informing him that she has died after falling into a well. Krishan, a young middle-class man, decides to take a train from Colombo to the Northern Province to attend the funeral to pay his respects and also in the hope of finding out more about Rani’s death, which he feels might not be just an accident. The novel is essentially his rumination as he travels on the train, and later attends the cremation rituals. During the train journey we will come to know Anjum, an activist he had a relationship with while he lived in Delhi, and the backstories of Rani and his grandmother.

 

Horatia Harrod on Anuk Arudpragasam's 'A Passage North'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNIulTGCwAI

Horatia Harrod on Anuk Arudpragasam's 'A Passage North'

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam review / Love and war in Sri Lanka

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam review – love and war in Sri Lanka

A debut novel which raises timely questions about how we regard the suffering of others

Randy Boyagoda
Sat 22 Oct 2016 09.30 BST

T

he opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also.” It brings to mind the images of stunned, bloodied children now coming out of Syria and other war zones. The novel both implicitly and explicitly raises crucial questions about the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in regarding the suffering of others.

A pioneering pilot, a vast wilderness, a drunken afternoon... Booker shortlisted authors reveal their inspirations

Top from left: Anuk Arudpragasam, Patricia Lockwood, Nadifa Mohamed; bottom from left: Maggie Shipstead, Damon Galgut and Richard Powers

A pioneering pilot, a vast wilderness, a drunken afternoon... Booker shortlisted authors reveal their inspirations

Patricia Lockwood, Anuk Arudpragasam, Richard Powers and more on how they made the 2021 shortlist

Booker prize reveals globe-spanning longlist of ‘engrossing stories’

Rachel Cusk’s singular novel stands out on wide-ranging Booker longlist

Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age

Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist

Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up

Patricia Lockwood, Anuk Arudpragasam, Maggie Shipstead, Richard Powers, Nadifa Mohamed and Damon Galgut
Sat 23 Oct 2021 10.00 BST

Patricia Locwood

Patricia Lockwood

‘I did not see a character, but rather a horizon’

The idea often comes on a heightened day, when you’ve had too much of something or too little of something else, or when everything is about to be completely different. On the day I started No One Is Talking About This we were moving apartments, and I was hiding from my husband in the bedroom so I didn’t have to help – or, as he more charitably put it, so I didn’t walk directly into the movers just as they were lifting my Glass Menagerie out the door.

I sat on the floor and began to read Mrs Caliban, the 1982 masterpiece by Rachel Ingalls. This was before it was rereleased, and I had long ago lent out my cherished copy with the abstract, beloved frogman on the cover. I barely remembered the lurking background sadness of the book, that the protagonist had lost a child. I did not yet know that I would have a niece, and we would call her Little Froggy. I just felt the heightened moment, and for some inexplicable reason took a picture with my phone of the shadows that the vines were making on the wall, in my now empty bedroom, where I sat alone, not helping. I probably looked at the picture and considered whether I should post it.

The initial voice of Mrs Caliban asks: Are you living one day perpetually? I thought, I am living one day perpetually. I closed my eyes and saw forward movement. I did not see a character at all, but rather a horizon that she walked towards and could not reach, wide as a line of text. I thought: “What would happen if I wrote about my real day, as I really lived it,” and I wrote the first line. The horizon came no closer. I thought, I could write this book for ever, until something really happens.

When the news of the shortlist came I sat at the desk in the hotel room and tried to steady myself. I saw a roomful of people in … gowns? Tuxedoes? Then I thought of the human face that I see so constantly: curling hair, damp forehead, large eyes. When they asked me how I felt, I said all I could say: that it was too much, it was immense, that I was grateful.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury.

Anuk Arudpragasam 
Photograph: Ruvin De Silva

Anuk Arudpragasam

‘The Sri Lankan civil war shaped my writing more than any firsthand experience’

There are certain events that seem to exist outside time, that seem to remain fixed in the mind, vivid and primordial, suspended in a kind of endless present. They stay with us as we wake, as we eat, and as we work, through all the little tribulations of everyday life.

For myself and members of my community, the destruction of Tamil society in northern Sri Lanka during the final two years of the civil war was such an event, and despite the fact that I was absent while it happened, precisely because I was absent, perhaps, it has shaped my writing more than anything I have felt or experienced firsthand. My first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was an attempt to project myself into the midst of that great violence, a small, private penance born out of shame at my unscarred body and my easy life. It was a hard book to write, and when I finished I wanted to move on to less painful topics, to write about situations that were closer to the world I actually inhabited. I began writing about the relationship between a young man and his grandmother in Colombo, a novel about desire, ageing and the passage of time. As the pages accumulated, though, I started noticing my earlier subject surfacing in oblique and unexpected ways, like little Freudian slips that betrayed my conscious plans. Disturbed by their appearance, my first impulse was to excise these moments of violence from the text, and it was only over the course of months and years that I came to accept what now seems obvious: that I was still unable to move on.

I decided I would write not about the violence, exactly, but about what it means to witness such violence from afar, to be unable to act or intervene, and then unable to forget. When violence of such magnitude becomes ingrained in one’s consciousness even the most innocent habits begin to feel inappropriate, to seem frivolous or absurd or disrespectful. Everyday life becomes subject to constant scrutiny, to a relentless interrogation of what is consonant and dissonant with the awareness of genocide. A Passage North is about other things too – desire and longing, the possibilities of liberation – but above all it is about the daily life of such a consciousness, about how, even as time passes, certain events never let us go.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam is published by Granta.

Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead

‘A statue of the pilot Jean Batten caught my eye’

In October 2012, a statue outside the international terminal of Auckland airport caught my eye: a woman in an overcoat balanced on the balls of her feet as though striding forward, one hand cradling a bouquet of flowers and the other aloft, waving. This was the pilot Jean Batten, who, in 1936, had been the first person to fly solo from England to her home country of New Zealand. A quotation of hers, inscribed on the pedestal, began: “I was destined to be a wanderer.”

I was heading home to California after a solo trip around the South Island. At the time I had started what I’d thought would be my third novel, but the project had died on me 100 pages in, leaving me lost and mopey. Uncertainty about what to write next always feels like it’s about to crystallise into never writing anything ever again. But Batten’s triumphant bronze likeness and her confidence in her own destiny triggered a simple, decisive thought: I should write about an aviator.

Two years passed before I started work on Great Circle, and three more before I finished a mammoth 980-page first draft. Since I’m constitutionally unable to plan books before I start writing them, I was (forgive me) flying blind through the construction of a narrative involving two intertwined plotlines, multiple eras and voices, about a million distinct settings, an ever-expanding cast of characters, and occasional forays into natural and human history that reached as far back as the ice age. The research was constant and relentless, the scale of the process overwhelming. Partly in service of the book, I became a travel journalist during those years, and Marian’s peripatetic life blurred into my reality.

When a novel is still in progress, it is alive in your private, inner world, roaming and shape-shifting. To finish it, for it to become a book, you must, in some ways, kill it. You freeze it in place, render it as immovable as a fossil, extinguish its what-ifs, give up hope of taming its imperfections. But that is all necessary for it to live again in the minds of readers. The Booker shortlisting is an unexpected and indelible inflection point in the life of this book and my own, a joyful thing I’m grateful to be experiencing.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is published by Doubleday.

Richard Powers

‘I was locked down in half a million acres of wilderness’

When the pandemic hit, I went into quarantine in the Great Smoky Mountains. It was a lucky place to be locked down, with half a million acres of wilderness in my backyard. But it proved to be a hard place to begin writing a new novel. I couldn’t travel to explore the places where a new story might unfold. I couldn’t interview people in person or gather print materials in a library, the way I usually do when setting out on a new project. But I pressed ahead in isolation, trying to fashion a story out of old bits of material that I had squirreled away for years.

Bewilderment Written by Richard Powers Photograph: PR

A month or two in, I hit the wall. My characters weren’t coming alive, and I knew that something was wrong with my plot. When I can’t write, it’s usually a sign that I shouldn’t be writing. And the best remedy I know for that impasse is to get out and walk.

I walked almost every day for a few weeks. One overcast afternoon, four miles down a remote trail that tracked a steep mountain stream, I felt a small boy walking alongside me, taking in the nearby heron that was fishing in the cascades, looking up at the tunnels of rhododendron and down at the carpets of hepatica and rue anemone. He seemed to say: “Are you for real?” It was the same phrase that a friend’s beloved son, who had special needs, had always liked to ask me when he couldn’t tell if I was being serious or just teasing. I thought that this visitor was asking if the world really was as rich and wild and lucky as the trail we were on. Then it seemed he was asking if we were really letting it all disappear.

The vague impression passed quickly, but by the time I turned back and retraced the four miles to the trailhead, I could see my story’s central character in detail.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers is published by Hutchinson Heinemann.

Nadifa Mohamed

Nadifa Mohamed

‘I was struck by a mugshot of a Somali sailor imprisoned in Cardiff in the 1950s’

Inspiration is a strange word; it sounds so clear and defined while the reality is much stranger. The desire to write The Fortune Men crept up on me over many years, a desire that would ebb and flow but never let me go. I first read about Mahmood Mattan in my early 20s when I had just finished a history and politics degree from Oxford with little knowledge of my own history. I was struck by a mugshot of a Somali sailor imprisoned in Cardiff in the 1950s in a tabloid newspaper: I remember discussing him with my friends and then my father, who told me he had known him when they both lived in Hull. I wanted to know what had brought Mahmood here and what had led to his lonely and early death in Cardiff prison.

Other books got in the way but there was a sense of unfinished business and in 2015 I started researching Mahmood’s story in earnest. The National Archives allowed me a luxury I had never enjoyed before – transcripts, photos, receipts, all the hoarded documents of the British state – and as I read through them I saw the tragedy play out in real time. He had thought he understood how things worked in this country but those papers in their bureaucratese showed how much he misunderstood the danger he was in. The relationship between writer and subject began to shift as his own defiant words rang in my mind; he could speak well enough for himself, it wasn’t for me to create this character but to listen to and empathise with him.

It was also easy to fall in love with the world that the novel was set in: I wish I had heard a young Shirley Bassey busking with her cap, that I had seen Tiger Bay alive as one of the most important docklands in the world. I felt I had found my kind of place and my kind of people. Mahmood was the spirit who had led me there and who still haunted it but the Britain that they had helped create – cosmopolitan, creative – was the one I wanted to declare loyalty to.

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed is published by Viking.

Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut

‘The idea came to me one semi-drunken afternoon’

What goes into the writing of a book? Sometimes even the writer doesn’t know. The origins of this novel probably lie in my childhood and the experience of growing up in Pretoria in the 1960s and 70s. My unhappy family life from back then is in there too, with all its fractures and foibles; to say nothing of the country at large, with its conflicting chorus of voices.

On a more conscious level, the idea for the book came to me one semi-drunken afternoon, listening to a friend describe the funerals of his parents, brother and sister. Unlikely though it sounds, he turned tragedy into comedy, by focusing on the antics of the living. At least one of his anecdotes – about a hysterical relative forcing the undertaker to open the coffin, to check the right corpse was inside – found its way into the novel. Dark stuff, to be sure; but not without its funny, human fringe.

The dramatist in me saw the potential in staging a family history in four acts, each one centred on a burial. And if each act took place in a different decade, with a different president in power, I saw a way to show the nation behind the family, and give a taste of the time.

Every narrative has its own voice, and it can take a while to find it. When I started writing, I floundered amongst all the death and decay. That wasn’t my subject, but how to break free? Key in this case was setting the novel aside to do a film script. Not a fulfilling experience in itself, but revolutionary for the book when I came back to it. Here was the voice I was looking for: like the camera in a Fellini movie, a character in its own right, observing, commenting, mocking, wondering. The antidote to Death is Life, of course, and now I heard what it sounded like.

From that point, the writing took on a freedom I hadn’t felt before. I could jump between multiple points of view, sometimes in a single sentence. I could even break the fourth wall, as theatre and film have been doing for decades, and address the reader directly. But why stop there? I saw other walls to knock down, and I’d found my hammer. No other writing experience has given me this kind of deep pleasure. Who knew that vandalism could be so much fun?

 The Promise by Damon Galgut is published by Chatto.

 The winner of the Booker prize will be announced on November 3 in an award ceremony held in partnership with the BBC and broadcast live from 7.15pm.

 The winner will discuss their work and answer some of your questions at a special Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 9 November. 

THE GUARDIAN