Shehan Karunatilaka Wins Booker Prize for ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ (Published 2022)
- ️Mon Oct 17 2022
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The Sri Lankan writer received the award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, for his second novel, which examines the trauma of his country’s decades-long civil war.
Oct. 17, 2022
As a boy living through Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s, Shehan Karunatilaka thought of political violence as part of the landscape. War was a constant backdrop to daily life, more mundane than frightening at times.
So when he had the idea for a novel about a Sri Lankan war photographer who wakes up dead, in an underworld populated with victims of political violence, he conjured up what felt like the most realistic version of the afterlife: a tedious, dysfunctional bureaucracy, where hordes of confused ghosts are waiting to be processed.
On Monday, that novel, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” was awarded the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.
“We admired enormously the ambition and the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution,” Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum and the chair of this year’s judges, said during a news conference. “It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster journey through life and death.”
“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” was one of several political satires recognized by the Booker judges this year. The six finalists also included the Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel “Glory,” a parable about an African dictator that features a cast of talking animals, and “The Trees,” Percival Everett’s blistering and darkly funny novel about a pair of Black detectives who investigate a series of murders that echo the lynching of Emmett Till.
The judges, who were unanimous in choosing “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” were won over by “the variety of registers it was deploying, the skill with which language was used, and the confidence with which it shifted genre,” from noir to philosophical reflections to comedy, MacGregor said.