Shehan Karunatilaka has won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a blackly comic mystery set amid the murderous mayhem of his native Sri Lanka’s civil war in 1990. The Booker Prize judges called it “a whodunnit and a race against time, full of ghosts, gags and a deep humanity”.
Neil MacGregor, chair of the judges, said: “What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. 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 justify every human life.”
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Karunatilaka, who was born in 1975, won the Commonwealth Prize for his debut novel, Chinaman (2011), which was declared the second-best cricket book of all time by Wisden. An earlier version of The Seven Moons was published in India in 2020 as Chats with the Dead. He is the second Sri Lankan to win the Booker. Michael Ondaatje won in 1992 for The English Patient. Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted last year for A Passage North, also a novel about Sri Lanka’s civil war.
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“We’ve had a lot of Sri Lankan writing in English since the 1990s: Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera,” said Karunatilaka. “But for me the guru was a gentleman called Carl Muller. He wrote The Jam Fruit Tree in 1993, and he was one of the first who used the way Sri Lankans speak.” The Booker winner’s other influences include Douglas Adams, George Saunders and Kurt Vonnegut.
“This is a classic Booker book,” wrote John Self in his Irish Times review last Saturday, “a little-known author telling us in an inventive way about a significant historical event… Seven Moons takes a hard subject and gives it a light touch and even comedy. ‘Even the dead enjoy a bit of slapstick.’ And it is steeped in western popular culture and music, from Pet Shop Boys to Queen. But there are grotesque descriptions too of torture and killing, which require a strong stomach to take.”
Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closeted gay man, has woken up dead and dismembered. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
Karunatilaka, who works as a copywriter, began writing the novel in 2014 but decided to set it 25 years earlier. “1989 was the darkest year in my memory,” he said, “where there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counter-terror squads… Despite having a grim history and a troubled present, Sri Lanka is not a dour or depressing place. We specialise in gallows humour and make jokes in the face of our crises.”
Karunatilaka received the trophy from Britain’s queen consort and the £50,000 (€57,000) prize from Damon Galgut, who won last year with The Promise. Irish author Claire Keegan was one of the six shortlisted authors to receive £2,500 for her novel, Small Things Like These. MacGregor’s fellow judges were Shahidha Bari; Helen Castor; M John Harrison; and Alain Mabanckou.
The Booker winner is published by a small independent press, Sort of Books, set up in 1999 by Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz, founders of the Rough Guide travel series, mainly to help their friend Chris Stewart launch his debut book, Driving Over Lemons, which has sold more than a million copies. Its other authors include Moomins creator Tove Jansson and Scottish nature writer Kathleen Jamie.
