Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, published in the US by Europa Editions. The novel is the story of an Afrikaner family told over the course of three decades. Galgut had previously been shortlisted for the Book twice and is the third South African author to win the award. You can watch Galgut read from the book here.
Deep Vellum Publishing is relaunching Dalkey Archive Press in Spring 2022. The company will reissue classic Dalkey titles and publish new fiction.
For The Nation, Lindsay Zoladz reviews a recent biography of director Mike Nichols by Mark Harris: “In contrast to the narrative that Nichols’s defining achievements were behind him by the time he wrapped The Graduate, Harris reframes [the] later era of Nichols’s career as one of mutually enriching collaboration.”
Vinson Cunningham interviews Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize–winning author and playwright, for the New Yorker. Soyinka’s third novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, is out now, almost fifty years after his last. They discuss the “World Happiness Report,” why Soyinkia finds writing for the theatre more straightforward than writing novels, and more. On the pursuit of tranquility, Soyinka said: “I know I cannot attain that if I have not attended to an issue, a problem, which I know is pernicious, which I know is manifesting itself in a dehumanizing way in others.”
Journalist Amy Rose Spiegel has a new podcast, Power: Hugh Heffner, which tells the story of Playboy magazine’s rise through the eyes of the women who helped create Heffner’s empire.
At the Paris Review, an excerpt from The Savage Detectives Reread by author and professor David Kurnick: “The American ignorance and arrogance exposed by the Bolaño skeptics was in no way surprising, as anyone who has participated in the competitive anti-Americanism among Americans abroad knows. For every asshole traipsing through Mexico City brandishing The Savage Detectives, there was someone else who knew enough to bury his copy deep in his luggage.”