South African writer Damon Galgut won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Wednesday with "The Promise," a novel about one white family's reckoning with South Africa's racist history. Galgut had been British bookmakers' runaway favorite to win the 50,000-pound ($69,000) prize with his story of a troubled Afrikaner family and its broken promise to a Black employee " a tale that reflects bigger themes in South Africa's transition from apartheid. Galgut took the prize on his third time as a finalist, for a book the judges called a "tour de force." He was previously shortlisted for "The Good Doctor" in 2003 and "In a Strange Room" in 2010, but lost both times. Despite his status as favorite, Galgut said he was "stunned" to win. Galgut said he was accepting the prize "on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I'm part of."

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