Shehan shortlisted for Booker Prize
View(s):Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has been shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. He is the second Sri Lankan to be shortlisted for the prize in two years.
Six books were chosen from a longlist of 13: Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, The Trees by Percival Everett, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout and Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.
‘These six books, we believe, speak powerfully about important things. Set in different places at different times, they are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere, and concern us all. Each written in English, they demonstrate what an abundance of Englishes there are, and how many distinct worlds, real and imaginary, exist in that simple-seeming space, the Anglosphere,” said Neil MacGregor, chair of the Booker Prize 2022 judges, in a statement.
This year, five judges chose from 169 submissions to determine the 2022 longlist and shortlist. Judges for the 2022 Prize include Neil MacGregor, cultural historian, broadcaster and writer; academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; author and literary critic M. John Harrison; and novelist and professor Alain Mabanckou.
“Why did we choose these six? In every one, the author uses language not only to tell us what happens, but to create a world which we, outsiders, can enter and inhabit — and not merely by using words from local languages or dialects. NoViolet Bulawayo’s incantatory repetitions induct us all into a Zimbabwean community of memory and expectation, just as Alan Garner’s shamanic obliquities conjure a realm that reason alone could never access. Percival Everett and Shehan Karunatilaka spin fantastical verbal webs of Gothic horror — and humour — that could not be further removed from the hypnotic, hallucinatory clarity of Claire Keegan’s and Elizabeth Strout’s pared-down prose. Most important, all affirm the importance and the power of finding and sharing the truth,” said MacGregor.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Karunatilaka’s second novel was published in India in 2020 as Chats with the Dead. In an email interview with The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka in July, Karunatilaka noted that it was the same story in spirit, “with roughly the same characters, but with a few subplots revised”.
The 2022 winner will be announced on Monday, October 17 in an awards ceremony held in London. The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500. The winner will receive £50,000.
A.I
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