The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka wins the Booker Prize 2022

Neil MacGregor, Chair of the 2022 judges, said:

‘Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. 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.’
 

Shehan Karunatilaka is one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors. In addition to his novels he has written rock songs, screenplays and travel stories.

He emerged on to the global literary stage in 2011, when he won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSL and Gratiaen Prize for his debut novel, Chinaman. The book was declared the second-best cricket book of all time by Wisden.

Born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, Karunatilaka grew up in Colombo, studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He currently lives in Sri Lanka. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, GQ and National Geographic. He has worked as an advertising copywriter and played guitar in a band called Independent Square.
 

‘I began thinking about it in 2009, after the end of our civil war, when there was a raging debate over how many civilians died and whose fault it was. A ghost story where the dead could offer their perspective seemed a bizarre enough idea to pursue, but I wasn’t brave enough to write about the present, so I went back 20 years, to the dark days of 1989.

‘1989 was the darkest year in my memory, where there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counter-terror squads. It was a time of assassinations, disappearances, bombs and corpses. But by the end of the 1990s, most of the antagonists were dead, so I felt safer writing about these ghosts, rather than those closer to the present.

‘I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned about Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents. But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms.

‘I borrowed from a lot of mythologies and also the idea that the spirit hovers around for seven days - you see that in different forms of Buddhism and other eastern religions. But the real breakthrough was seeing the afterlife as a visa office, as a government bureaucracy with spirits wandering around, not knowing where they are supposed to go.

‘We have this illusion that all our questions will be answered when we breathe our last; you close your eyes, open them and it suddenly all makes sense. But it made more sense to me that you’d be absolutely more confused when you wake up.’ 

Read more here.

The TLS:
‘A rollicking magic-realist take on a recent bloody period in Sri Lankan history, set in an unpeaceful afterlife. It is messy and chaotic in all the best ways. It is also a pleasure to read: Karunatilaka writes with tinder-dry wit and an unfaltering ear for prose cadences.’

The Times:
‘Karunatilaka respects the conventions of all the genres that he piles up so extravagantly. The whodunnit part leads to a suitably unguessable final revelation of the culprit. The thriller-like quest for the photos serves up several properly exciting cliff-hangers. However wild it becomes, the magic realism takes place within a well-thought-out framework of what is and isn’t possible.’

The Guardian:
‘Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.’

The Hindu.com:
‘Karunatilaka increasingly raises questions of what you’re remembered as you die; what your love meant for those you left behind; and if it was all worth it in the end, to frequently moving effect.’