Booker winner to live in NZ
Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize - and might soon be returning to live in New Zealand, where he studied at Massey University and Whanganui Collegiate.
Kiwi journalism grasps at every single tenuous connection to New Zealand but there are actually very strong links with Karunatilaka, who has won fiction's most prestigious literary prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
Karunatilaka, 47, was born in Colombo. He attended high school at Whanganui Collegiate and then took a BA and a post-graduate diploma in business and administration at Massey University in Palmerston North.
Newsroom understands he has recently completed the paperwork to move his family to New Zealand, and is likely to make the move next year. A source has also told Newsroom he has applied for a very cool writers residency award in New Zealand (not as cool as the Surrey Hotel writers residency award but still quite good).
He appeared at the 2013 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Gala hosted by Carol Hirschfeld, and in an event alongside Eleanor Catton - two future Booker Prize winners, on one stage! - and spoke about how his love of reading began in the Collegiate library, which "became a place of refuge from some of the bigotry he experienced at school". Yes, that sounds like the authentic New Zealand experience. And in a recent interview with the Guardian, he was asked, "Did you read a lot as a child?", and replied, "My mum gave me books but I don’t think I was reading more than anyone else. It did escalate as a teenager, when I went to boarding school in New Zealand."
He was invited to the Auckland festival to promote his first book Chinaman, about the mysterious disappearance of a Sri Lankan spin bowler. (Karunatilaka describes himself as a "failed cricketer, failed rock star, failed vegan".) A passage in the novel reads, "When a New Zealand journo, with a nose resembling the beak of his national bird, asked me why Lankans have long names, I told him I would rather have a long name than a long nose. He replied he'd rather have a long you-know-what. Such is the insightful cricketing analysis that goes on in the press box.”
So many New Zealand connections!
His first book Chinaman was published in 2011. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is his second book and is described in the Guardian as a "violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man...It plumbs national violence and atrocity, teasing out its roots in colonial history. It’s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person." The book was actually first published as Chats with the Dead, in India, in 2019. Its opening line: "There's a corpse every second. Sometimes two." The setting is Sri Lanka during the 1989 civil war. Booker Prize judges called it a “race against time, full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity”.
Karunatilaka, married with two children, is the second Sri Lankan to win the Booker, following Michael Ondaatje’s victory in 1992 for The English Patient.
Sri Lankan New Zealand authors include Brannavan Gnanalingam and Himali McInnes.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka ($40) is available in bookstores nationwide.
