Shehan Karunatilaka has been named the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize.
The Sri Lankan author received the prize from the Queen Consort Camilla at the Roundhouse in London during Monday (17 October) night’s awards ceremony for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
The book centres around the killing of a war photographer in Colombo in the 1990s and explores life after death amid a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
During his speech, Karunatilaka said it had been an “honour and privilege” to appear alongside the other winners on the shortlist.
He also jokingly asked if he could get the £50,000 prize in cryptocurrency.
The Booker Prize judges called the novel a “whodunnit and a race against time, full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity”.
Chair of the judging panel Neil MacGregor described The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as “an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west”.
In it, he said, readers will discover “the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life”.
In winning the prize Karunatilaka becomes the second Sri Lankan-born author to take home the award. Michael Ondaatje won the prize for The English Patient in 1992.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is his second novel. The first, 2011’s Chinaman, won the Commonwealth Prize, the DSL and the Gratiaen Prize, and was selected for the BBC and The Reading Agency’s Big Jubilee Read last year.
Karunatilaka was born in Galle but grew up in Colombo. He studied in New Zealand and has worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore, before settling in Sri Lanka once again.
Of his Booker Prize-winning novel, he said: “Sri Lankans specialise in gallows humour and make jokes in the face of crises… it’s our coping mechanism.”
The annual prize is given to the best English-language novel published in the UK or Ireland, with recent winners including Margaret Atwood, Bernadine Evaristo and Douglas Stuart.
Monday’s awards ceremony was presented by comedian Sophie Duker and featured a keynote speech from Dua Lipa.
The other shortlisted works were Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, The Trees by Percival Everett, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, and Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.
