President congratulates Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka

(FASTNEWS | COLOMBO) – President Ranil Wickremesinghe has congratulated Shehan Karunatilaka on becoming the second Sri Lankan-born author to receive the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.”

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has congratulated Shehan Karunatilaka on becoming the second Sri Lankan-born author to receive the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.”

Earlier this morning, Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka won the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is a supernatural satire set amid the Sri Lankan civil war.

The Sri Lankan writer’s novel 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 conflict with the LTTE, “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”.