Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka wins Booker Prize

Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka's novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has won the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction. 

The prestigious £50,000 prize, for a single work of fiction published in the UK in English, also gives the other five writers on the shortlist £2,500 each.

The Booker Prize judges had stated that what they particularly admired and enjoyed about the book was "the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques."

Camilla, the Queen Consort, presented the prize while pop star Dua Lipa was the star guest. 

"Accepting the prize, Karunatilaka said that his hope for the book is "that in the not too distant future... Sri Lanka has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work."

"I hope it's in print in 10 years... if it is, I hope it's written in a Sri Lanka that learns from its stories, and that Seven Moons will be in the fantasy section of the bookshop, next to the dragons, the unicorns and will not be mistaken for realism or political satire" he added. 

President Ranil Wickremesinghe was among those who congratulated the author. The President's Media Division stated that the President congratulated Shehan Karunatilaka on becoming the second Sri Lankan-born author to receive the prestigious Booker Prize for his second novel.

Michael Ondaatje was the first Sri Lankan-born author to win the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient in 1992. 

What is the book about?

During the height of the Sri Lankan civil war, Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems to be a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake in central Colombo and he has no idea who killed him.

At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.

But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has ‘seven moons’ to find out who killed him and to try and contact the man and woman he loves most in order to lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.