Shehan Karunatilaka: Cricket writer, satirist, and now Booker Prize-winner
(Picture: Booker Prize Foundation/PA)The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a supernatural satire by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, has won the Booker Prize for Fiction.
The novel tells the story of a photographer who wakes up dead, with a week to ask his friends to find his photos and expose the brutality of the Sri Lankan civil war. With no idea who killed him, Maali has seven moons to contact the people he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos of civil-war atrocities that will rock Sri Lanka.
The judges praised the “ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques”.
Neil MacGregor, chair of the judges for this year’s prize, said the novel was chosen because “it’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world”.
“And there the reader finds, to their surprise, joy, tenderness, love, and loyalty,” he added.
Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, comes more than a decade after his debut, Chinaman, which was published in 2011.
The prestigious £50,000 prize, for a single work of fiction published in the UK in English, also awards the other five writers on the shortlist £2,500 each.
Karunatilaka said as he accepted his prize: “My hope 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.
Who is Shehan Karunatilaka?
Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Galle, southern Sri Lanka, in 1975, and grew up in Colombo.
As a boy, Karunatilaka lived through Sri Lanka’s bloody 1980s civil war, which became the inspiration for his latest novel.
He studied in New Zealand, and went on to live and work in London. Before publishing his debut novel in 2010, he worked in advertising, as well as writing for the Guardian, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, GQ, and National Geographic, among others.
Karunatilaka also dabbled in music, playing bass with Sri Lankan rock bands and writing rock songs, fostering a lifelong obsession with rock band The Police.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is Karunatilaka’s second novel, having previously won awards, including the Commonwealth Book Prize, for his debut book Chinaman, which was called the “second-best cricket book of all time”, by cricketers’ almanac Wisden.
His website describes him as a writer of “punchlines, manifestos, and calls-to-action”.
He currently lives in Colombo, where he still writes ad copy during the day and works on his fiction in the early morning.
What is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida about?
Written in the second person, the novel takes place in Colombo, in 1989, when a war photographer named Maali Almeida wakes up dead, with no idea as to how or why he was killed.
Almeida sets out to solve the mystery of his own murder, suspecting he’s been targeted for his controversial photographs. A gambler, an atheist, and a closeted gay man, Almeida tries to navigate the afterlife and is told he has “seven moons” to learn who killed him and to uncover his cache of photos.
Along the way, many of the people he meets are victims of the bloody violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the Eighties, such as a Tamil university lecturer who was killed for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers.
Karunatilaka first had the idea for the novel that became The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida in 2009.
In the immediate aftermath of the civil war, as Sri Lanka was undergoing a national reckoning over the causes of the conflict, Karunatilaka wondered what processing the trauma of war would feel like if the dead could speak, and thought about writing a ghost story.
“Maybe that is a plausible explanation for why Sri Lanka seems to go from tragedy to tragedy, that there are all these restless spirits and ghosts wandering around, confused, not sure what they’re supposed to do, and they amuse themselves by whispering bad ideas into people’s ears,” Karunatilaka said in a video posted on the Booker website.
“I thought, this is a useful way of exploring this grim subject matter, but having a bit of lightness and a bit of playfulness also.”
