Literary Birthday – 12 November – Damon Galgut

Happy Birthday, Damon Galgut, born 12 November 1963.

Five Quotes

1. Memory is fiction … All memory is a way of reconstructing the past… The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction.
2. Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That’s the kind of writing that interests me.
3. The truth is, one has to be one’s own sharpest critic – by the time the writing is done, I usually know what the weaknesses and strengths are, and I know that I couldn’t have done it better, even though I might wish to.
4. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time made audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
5. Persist, persist, persist.

Damon Galgut is an award-winning South African playwright and novelist. He is best known for writing The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room. Both books were nominated for the Man Booker Prize. His latest book is Arctic Summer. In 2021, Galgut won the Booker prize for The Promise.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Damon_Galgut_(2013).png

Etonnants Voyageurs, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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