Sri Lankan Shehan Karunathilak's novel won the Booker

Mohtasim Fuad Mahi
Oct 20, 2022

Shehan Karunathilak । File Image
Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilak won the Booker Prize for his satirical novel 'The Seven Moons of Mali Almeida', set against the backdrop of the carnage of the civil war. The hero of his supernatural novel is a photographer who dies in the Sri Lankan civil war in the 1990s and wakes up in a cosmic visa office, not knowing who killed him. From that life beyond life, Mali Almeida continued to communicate with his loved ones through the seven moons, as if they were to find the hidden treasure of his photographs of the horrors of war, and shook Sri Lanka by publishing those photographs.

Britain's Queen Consort Camilla officially handed over the prestigious literature award to Shehan Karunatilak on Monday. In an immediate reaction, Karunatilak said it was a great honor for him to be shortlisted for the award. Only English-language fiction published in the UK is considered for the Booker Prize. Booker winning author gets £50,000. And the remaining five shortlisted writers were given two and a half thousand pounds.

Karunatilak said that after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, when there was a debate in his country about how many civilians were killed in that war, he decided in 2009 to write a ghost story, where the dead could give their own opinion. Praising the book, Neil McGregor, president of the Booker Prize jury, said, Karunatilak's novel is like an otherworldly irony, his writing takes the reader on a thrilling rollercoaster ride between life and death. After receiving the award, Karunatilak said, "I only hope that the day may not be far when Sri Lanka realizes that these issues of corruption, ethnic division and nepotism have not done anything good, and never will."

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