Shehan Karunatilaka’s supernatural satire The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which takes place in the midst of a bloody civil conflict in Sri Lanka, has won the Booker Prize.
The Sri Lankan writer’s novel, according to reports, is about a photographer who wakes up dead, with a week to ask his friends to find his photos and expose the brutality of war.
Camilla, the Queen Consort, presented the prize, and the author said it had been “an honour and a privilege” to be on the shortlist.
Pop singer Dua Lipa was the star guest.
The prestigious £50,000 prize, for a single work of fiction published in the UK in English, also gives the other five writers on the shortlist £2,500 each.
The writer said he decided in 2009 to write “a ghost story where the dead could offer their perspective” after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, “when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was”.
Head judge Neil MacGregor praised the “scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and hilarity” of the novel, calling it an “afterlife noir” which “takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death”.
He said the judges’ decision had been unanimous, adding all of the shortlisted books were “all really about one question, and that is what’s the point of an individual life?”
Karunatilaka said as he accepted his prize: “My hope is that in the not too distant future… Sri Lanka has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work”.
Dua Lipa made a speech talking about her “passion” for reading, calling it “one of the most profound joys in the world”.
The singer-songwriter, who was the UK’s most-played artist of 2020 and recommends books she enjoys on social media, said she had read all six shortlisted books, and “absolutely loved it”.
