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Fred Chappell, a poet, novelist and critic whose Faulknerian capacity to express universal themes of love, loss and memory through his evocations of North Carolina’s rural, mountainous west earned him a reputation as the South’s “premier contemporary person of letters,” in the words of one reviewer, died on Jan. 4 in Greensboro, N.C.

"The Orchard Keeper," "Outer Dark," and "Child of God" are grisly tales of Faulknerian rural horror that could have drawn a grimace from the Marquis de Sade.

That Faulknerian chestnut about the not-even-pastness of the past has rarely been illustrated with such vivid intimacy.

On Wednesday, the Booker judges pronounced Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century.”

The brilliant concept was to use the two stories to inform each other, letting the Faulknerian past that is “not even past” intrude upon the present.