Damon Galgut has been awarded the 2026 Pak Kyongni Prize, South Korea’s most prestigious international literary award.
The Toji Cultural Foundation announced the news on 29 September. Galgut will receive a certificate, a plaque and 100 million won (about R1.25 million)—the largest purse of any literary award in Korea—at a ceremony in Wonju on Thursday.
Often referred to as ‘Korea’s Nobel Prize in Literature’, the Pak Kyongni Prize was founded in 2011 in honour of the novelist Pak Kyongni (1926–2008), author of the epic family saga Toji (The Land). It is awarded annually to recognise a body of work, singling out a ‘writer who most truly embodies what it means to be a writer in our time, upholding literature’s intrinsic values and having greatly influenced the history of world literature’.
The judging committee praised Galgut’s ‘literary achievement in reaching beyond the specific time and place of South Africa to explore in depth the questions of memory, responsibility, and justice that the contemporary world universally faces’.
This year’s nominating committee considered 165 novelists from around the world, narrowing the field to twenty-six over four rounds of screening. The judging committee then spent about a year assessing the nominees and their work before selecting Galgut as the 2026 laureate.
Galgut is the first South African to receive the prize, and the second African laureate, after the late Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who won in 2016. Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr was among the three finalists for last year’s prize.
Previous laureates include Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Marilynne Robinson, Bernhard Schlink, Amos Oz, AS Byatt, Richard Ford, Ismail Kadare, Amin Maalouf, Christoph Ransmayr and Sylvie Germain.
Last year’s Pak Kyongni Prize was awarded to novelist Amitav Ghosh.
Born in Pretoria in 1963, Galgut wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His novels The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and he won the award in 2021 for The Promise, becoming the third South African to do so, after Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. His other novels include The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Impostor and Arctic Summer.
Of The Promise, the Toji Cultural Foundation wrote:
‘Galgut’s vision of a family’s irreversible ruin in South Africa, what Anton calls the “land of miracles”, leaves a bitter aftertaste. His message—that neither society nor its members can ever be whole without liberation in its truest sense—resonates with somber depth.’
During his visit to South Korea to receive the prize, Galgut will give a lecture at the Pak Kyongni Literature Park in Wonju, meet emerging Korean writers, and take part in a Laureate Talk at the Kyobo Building in Seoul on 3 November.
From all of us at The JRB, congratulations to Damon!
