Writer Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize for his supernatural satire entitled The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set in the midst of a murderous civil war in Sri Lanka. That reports the BBC.
The Sri Lankan author’s novel is about a photographer who wakes up dead and has a week to ask his friends to find his photos and expose the brutality of the war.
King’s wife Camilla presented the award on Monday evening in London, and pop singer Dua Lipa was a musical guest at the award ceremony.
Shehan Karunatilaka received the award from the hands of King Consort Camilla.
(Photo: TOBY MELVILLE/AFP)
Adjudicator Neil MacGregor praised the novel’s “range and skill, daring, audacity and comedy” and called it an “afterlife noir” that “takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through life and death”.
“We think it’s a book that will last,” he said, adding that the jury’s decision was unanimous and that of all the shortlisted books, “it was really just one question: What is the meaning of an individual life?”
Karunatilaka said the book is “dedicated to three women I live with”: one who read to him as a child, one who “lets me read to her before bed” and one who “reads my stuff before anyone does.” else does”.
The prize is endowed with 50,000 pounds. The other five authors shortlisted for the award will each receive £2,500.
Karunatilaka explained on the Booker websitethat despite its grim history and troubled present, Sri Lanka is not a grim or depressing place.
The people there “specialize in gallows humor… Laughter is clearly our coping mechanism,” he said. In 2009, after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, Karunatilaka decided to “write a ghost story where the dead can offer their perspective” at a time “when debate was raging about how many civilians died and who was to blame .”
He is the second Sri Lankan-born author to win the Booker Prize, after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient.