Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 50,000-pound ($86,000) Booker Prize, for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a mix of satire, ghost story and whodunnit set in 1989 during the Sri Lankan Civil War.
The titular character is a war photographer who discovers he has died and sets out to find out who killed him — navigating an afterlife that is surprisingly bureaucratic.
Announcing the prize at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, chair of the judging panel Neil MacGregor said that The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida "takes readers on a journey at once horrific and humorous — beyond life and beyond death, to the world's dark heart".
