- Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, published in the subcontinent as Chats with the Dead
His website describes him as a “Booker-shortlisted writer of punchlines, manifestos, and calls-to-action. Failed cricketer, failed rockstar, failed vegan. Observer of people, machines and markets. Does not know how to use semi-colons; and unable to spell diarrhea without assistance.”
But Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka will need to update that: the 47-year-old has won the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (published in the subcontinent as Chats with the Dead in 2020 by Penguin Random House). He is only the second Sri Lankan to win the prestigious £50,000 after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient.
Neil MacGregor, chair of the 2022 judges, said, “This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ‘the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justifies every human life.’
Who is Shehan Karunatilaka?
Born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, Karunatilaka is one of contemporary South Asia’s most exciting writers. He burst on to the literary scene with Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which he self-published in 2010, before it was picked up by Penguin Random House and launched in 2011. Karunatilaka’s cricketing parable, which cricketers’ almanac Wisden called the “second best cricket book of all time”, went on to win the Commonwealth Book Prize (2012) and the DSC Prize (2012).
The writer, who currently lives in Sri Lanka, has also written three children’s books. He has been an advertising copywriter and has over 20 years’ work experience in Asian and European markets, including in Singapore, London, Colombo, Sydney and Amsterdam. He was also a guitarist with a band called Independent Square. His latest collection of short stories, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises (Hachette India) has just been published.
The winning novel
Set in 1989, at the heart of a vicious and long-drawn civil war in Sri Lanka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a whodunnit set in the afterlife and came a decade after Karunatilaka’s feted debut. War photographer Maali Almeida wakes up dead in what appears to be a bureaucratic office in the afterlife, even as his dismembered body is dumped in the Beira Lake in central Colombo.
He has many problems of his own — he is a gambler, a closeted gay, and he has no clue about who his murderer is. As he races against time trying to solve his own murder mystery, what emerges is a satirical tale of a chaotic country, torn asunder by violence and held together along its frayed edges by the complicated commitment of men like Almeida. The judges said what set the book apart “was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques.”
In an interview to the Booker website a few weeks prior to his win, Karunatilaka, who began writing the novel in 2014, spoke of how the idea came to him in 2009, after the three-decade-long civil war in his country came to an end and “when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was… but I wasn’t brave enough to write about the present, so I went back 20 years, to the dark days of 1989,” he said.
On Monday, at the award ceremony in London, in his acceptance speech, the writer said, “…I was going to read all the names of 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…
My hope for Seven Moons… is this: that in the not too distant future, 10 years or for 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 and that it is read in a Sri Lanka that learns from its stories and that Seven Moons… will be in the fantasy section of the book shop… and will not be mistaken for realism and political satire.”
Other titles on the Booker
This year, the original 1969 trophy was reinstated in memory of its creator, children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, who passed away in February. The other shortlisted novels included Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo; Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, who, at 88, was the oldest writer on the shortlist; The Trees by Percival Everett; Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, also the briefest novel ever to be shortlisted, and, Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout. South African writer Damon Galgut won the award last year for his The Promise.
First published in Indian Express