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".
"There, astonishingly and encouragingly, we find tenderness, laughter, loyalty and love."
- Read more: 2022 Booker Prize shortlist reading guide
Karunatilaka's win comes as Sri Lanka recovers from a year of social, political and economic turmoil, during which anti-government protests resulted in the resignation of first Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Accepting the award, Karunatilaka said: "I was going to read the names of all the journalists, the activists, the politicians, the civilians, the innocents who have been murdered by the state, or by those opposing it, in my lifetime in Sri Lanka. But if I had done that, we'd be here all night."
He continued:
"My hope for Seven Moons is this: that in the not too distant future — 10 years or as long as it takes — that it is read in a Sri Lanka that has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work…I hope it's read in a Sri Lanka that learns from its stories, and that Seven Moons will be in the fantasy section of the bookshop — next to the dragons and unicorns — and will not be mistaken for realism or political satire."
Karunatilaka is the second Sri Lankan to win the Booker in its 53-year history, following Canadian Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatjie, who won in 1992 for The English Patient.
It is the second year in a row that a Sri Lankan author has been on the Booker Prize shortlist, following Anuk Arudpragasam, for A Passage North.
Ghost story as political commentary
Karunatilaka, 47, was born in Galle and grew up in Colombo.
With a background working in advertising, as a copywriter, he has proven adept at utilising humour and genre to explore Sri Lankan society: his 2011 debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, took readers inside the corruption of the Sri Lankan cricket world of the 80s via what he has described as a "drunk detective story".
Karunatilaka has also written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories.
Chinaman put him on the map as a novelist, winning several prizes, including the Commonwealth Book Prize — and setting him on a circuitous path to his latest novel.
"I didn't expect it [Chinaman] to travel outside of Colombo or outside of the subcontinent, but I was delighted to see it did quite well," Karunatilaka told ABC RN's The Book Show.
"And suddenly, I was called on to talk about cricket — but I wasn't really that much into cricket. I mean, I was researching for the novel, but there are a lot of Sri Lankans a lot more obsessed about cricket than me.
"And so I thought: OK, I should do something completely different for my next trick. And then I thought, 'What Sri Lanka needs is a great ghost story.' Because there's been plenty of other stories, but [not in that genre]. So I started collecting ghost stories and researching tragedies of the past.
"So that was the motivation [for The Seven Moons of Almeida]. But then I also realised that a ghost story … [was] a way to discuss this complicated political situation."
Karunatilaka was a teenager in 1989, when the novel is set, a period he describes as "the darkest time in our history", with multiple conflict fronts — between Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Tamil Tigers, and between the government and disaffected workers and students.
"[It was] heavy stuff for a teenager going to school — that you had two wars, effectively, happening at the same time," he told The Book Show.
"Looking back, from 20 to 30 years later, one thing I felt safe about [in] writing about this period was [that] most of the protagonists and antagonists were dead, and this period had been well-documented. And both of those wars were effectively over. So yeah, it seemed like a very good place to set a ghost story, because there wasn't a shortage of corpses or restless spirits."
In The Seven Moons of Almeida, he tackles this dark chapter of history with a satirical tone, and offsets the horror of violence with gallows humour.
In the opening act of the novel, for example, the practicalities of body disposal are discussed by two thugs who are working out what to do with Maali's corpse.
The afterlife, meanwhile, is plagued by bureaucratic inefficiencies and populated by restless souls who have to get a piece of paper stamped by the right department in order to be 'processed'.
"I think as Sri Lankans it's better to laugh than to cry — and if you don't laugh, that's what you end up doing," Karunatilaka told The Book Show.
"You know, Sri Lanka is a grim place most of the time, but it's not a sad, depressing place ... because we tend to appreciate the absurdity and the humour in it."
