Sri Lanka Karunatilaka wins the Booker Prize with the satirical “underworld whodunnit”

Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka is this year’s Booker Prize winner. She receives the prestigious Anglophone Literature Award for her satirical novel The seven moons of Maali Almeida, about a Sri Lankan war photographer who wakes up dead in the underworld and has no idea how he died. It is the second book of him.

Karunatilaka came up with the idea of ​​writing the novel in 2009, right after the bloody civil war that lasted for decades in his country ended. He wondered how this gigantic war trauma could be dealt with if the dead could talk about it, which gave him the idea after a long struggle to write a black comedy set among the victims of this battle.

Karunatilaka describes the underworld as a kind of tedious tax administration-like bureaucracy in which confused souls try to get together while whispering bad ideas to the living for fun. Its protagonist, Maali Almeida, discovers that he has been murdered for his war photographs and that he has seven days to solve his own murder.

“Maybe it’s a plausible explanation why Sri Lanka seems to happen tragedy after tragedy, that wandering souls and ghosts roam,” says Karunatilaka, who previously lived in Amsterdam and now combines his writing career in Colombo with a job as a copywriter. “I thought it would be a useful way to look at this terrible topic, even with a little lightness and playfulness.”

The award jury, presented by the British queen consort Camilla, praised her approach. “We admire the ambition, the skill, the audacity and the hilarious execution,” said jury president MacGregor. “It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through life and death.” According to the jury, it is a “whodunnit and thriller teeming with brutal ghosts”.

Karunatilaka said in his acceptance speech that he hopes that in ten years’ time his book will no longer be seen as political satire, but as pure fiction. “So we understand that corruption, racism and favoritism have not worked and never will. I hope it will be read in a Sri Lanka who learns from his stories.”