Booker Prize 2021: Damon Galgut's The Promise wins the prestigious literary award

Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice before for previous novels The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room.

His latest novel, The Promise, explores recent South African history through the wish of a white woman to leave a house to a black woman who had worked for her. Rebecca Jones from BBC News described it as "beautifully written with characters you come to care deeply about".

• A Q&A with Damon Galgut on the Booker Prizes website

Anuk Arudpragasam has been nominated for the 2021 Booker Prize for his second novel, A Passage North.

The book follows Krishan's journey as he travels across Sri Lanka to attend a family funeral and was described by Jenny Bhatt on NPR as a "tender elegy" to those caught up in the country's civil war where an estimated 100,000 people were killed and 20,000 people remain missing.

• A Q&A with Anuk Arudpragasam on the Booker Prizes website

Having previously written two collections of poetry and a memoir, No One is Talking About This is Patricia Lockwood's debut novel.

The stylistically experimental book explores human experiences on social media. Writing in The New York Times, Merve Emre praised the book for transforming "all that is ugly and cheap about online culture into an experience of sublimity".

• A Q&A with Patricia Lockwood on the Booker Prizes website

While The Fortune Men is a novel, it is based on the true story of the wrongful murder conviction of Mahmood Mattan, the last man to be hanged in Wales in 1952.

David Lloyd, writing in Nation Cymru, called the book, Mohamed's third, a "wonderful, moving, disturbing novel, drawing on a huge injustice".

• A Q&A with Nadifa Mohamed on the Booker Prizes website

Richard Powers won one of literature's other major awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his previous novel, The Overstory.

In Bewilderment, Powers tells the story of astrobiologist Theo Byrne who is struggling to raise his son Robin after the death of his wife.

Susannah Butter declared the book, Powers' 13th novel, to be "completely refreshing, original and moving" in her Evening Standard review.

Maggie Shipstead's novel Great Circle weaves together the story of a trailblazing female aviator who disappeared in 1950 with that of a contemporary Hollywood star trying to make a film about her.

Writing in The Guardian, Stephanie Merritt called the book, which is Shipstead's third, "daringly ambitious".

• A Q&A with Maggie Shipstead on the Booker Prizes website

The six films featured above were produced by BBC New Creatives Yero Timi-Biu, Liam Young and Christine Ubochi. This scheme, supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts, gives emerging artists the chance to produce innovative new short films, audio and interactive works from young artists.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.