Sale of e-books not rising, even shrinking in some countries: Damon Galgut

Jaipur Literature Festival 2024: In a conversation with Business Standard, Galgut said currently non-fiction is thriving, and fiction is more under stress

At the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024, Damon Galgut, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction, discusses his early life and the future of books. Edited excerpts:

How important do you think literature festivals like JLF are?

These festivals are interesting. They actually have nothing to do with the writing of books, yet the book business increasingly depends on them.

In fact, it's almost possible to imagine a future where there are no more bookstores, only festivals. Most book sales will happen at these book festivals.

What will be the future of novels, especially fiction?

Currently, non-fiction is thriving, and fiction is more under stress. Yet, if one understands figures correctly, it seems to me that more people are reading now than ever before.

Certain genres are growing, like crime and romance. One genre that everyone agrees is not growing is literary fiction, and that happens to be my genre.

So, I am despairing a little on that front, but not on the future of books in general.

You said that the number of readers is at a high. Do e-books have any role in that? Are people shifting to digital books?

At one point, publishers were predicting that e-books would take over entirely. That printed books would cease to exist. I think there has been quite a strong shift in opinion. 

E-book sales have hit a plateau, and in many countries, they are a shrinking market. I think that's true of America and England. In some places like France, they never really took off.

However, I can't speak for the younger generation. But if people prefer to read e-books, as a writer, I don't care. I don't care how they receive my book as long as they read it.

Your book, 'The Promise', has a lot of layers. Also, it is based in South Africa, where you were brought up. How much of it draws from your own life?

It's not that any character in the book is based on anybody I know. But in another sense, all of it is based on my life.

It's an expression of everything I felt and thought and believed and processed while growing up in South Africa.

While growing up, which writers inspired you?

My early reading was very ordinary. I read JRR Tolkien, Enid Blyton – very conventional.

It was really in my early twenties that I started to discover the writers who excited me. These were people like Patrick White, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner.

What tips would you give to someone who is trying to be a writer today?

The problem is that writers are very different, and they write very different books.

From the perspective of a person who is interested in literary fiction, I think we should stake the future on language and the possibilities of language because it is one element that separates books from other storytelling mediums.

So, to me, what you can do with language to excite and stir the readers' interest is central to the literary experience.