The South African novelist on making a pilgrimage to Cormac McCarthy’s home, his youth in apartheid-era Pretoria and being shortlisted twice for the Booker prize

Novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, 57, grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. He wrote his first novel aged 17 and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker prize. His latest, The Promise, spans four tumultuous decades as it traces the afterlife of a white matriarch’s dying wish to bequeath property to her black servant. The novel is heavily tipped to land him a place on this year’s shortlist when it’s announced on 14 September. He lives in Cape Town.

How did The Promise originate?
Books tend to build up out of clusters of ideas or themes that you carry around for a while and worry at. The specific form of this book crystallised around a series of anecdotes that a friend told me when we had a semi-drunken lunch, about four family funerals he’d attended. It occurred to me that would be quite an interesting way to tell the story of one particular family. The promise itself also arrived from a friend, who was telling me how his mother had asked the family to give a certain piece of land to the black woman who had looked after her through her last illness, as it happens in the book.