Shehan Karunatilaka wrote his Booker Prize-winning novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” to give voice to Sri Lanka’s dead. He hoped the ghosts of the country’s bloody past could speak to its troubled present.
When the book became a finalist for the 50,000-pound ($58,000) fiction award this summer, protests over a deepening economic crisis gripped Sri Lanka. An uneasy calm had returned by Oct. 17, when Karunatilaka's novel won the prestigious prize, catapulting its author to literary stardom.
