Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious British Booker Prize on Monday evening for his novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. The book is a biting satire set in the civil war that rocked his country.
The jury hailed the “width and competence, audacity, boldness and hilarity” of the author, who thus saw his second novel crowned. This darkly humorous murder case is set in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in the post-civil war 1990s. It follows a war photographer, gamer and hidden homosexual, who tries to find out who killed him.
The literary prize was presented in London in the presence of Queen Consort Camilla, in the first in-person ceremony since 2019 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, is the second Sri Lankan-born writer to be awarded the Booker Prize, after Michael Ondaatje in 1992.
“Weird, difficult, strange”
On receiving the award, Shehan Karunatilaka greeted the other five finalists and thanked his publisher Sort of Books for publishing this “weird, difficult, strange” book. He expressed his hope that “in the not too distant future” Sri Lanka will “understand that these ideas of corruption, greed and cronyism don’t work and never will.”
Last year the prize went to South African author Damon Galgut for ‘The Promise’, a book about time spent in a white farming family in South Africa post-apartheid. The winner wins the reward of 50,000 pounds sterling (about 56,000 francs) and the assurance of international fame.
Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood or Hilary Mantel, who died last month at 70, are among the writers who received the prize for novels written in English.
agencies/br