Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, won the prestigious British Booker Prize this Monday for his novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, a satire framed in the civil war that shook his country.
The jury recognized “the breadth and skill, the daring and the hilarity” of the author, who receives the award for his second novel. The plot of murders, narrated with dark humor, takes place in the capital of Sri Lanka in the 1990s, after the civil war.
Upon receiving the award, Karunatilaka thanked the publisher Sort of Books for publishing the “bizarre, difficult, strange” book. The writer expressed hope that “in the not-too-distant future, the book will be read in a Sri Lankan who has understood that these ideas of corruption, greed and patronage do not and never will.”
The award was presented in London by the Queen Consort, Camilla, in one of her major public appearances since her husband’s accession to the throne.
Shehan Karunatilaka is the second Sri Lankan writer to win the Booker Prize, after Michael Ondaatje in 1992, for “The English Patient”. The competition awards £50,000 to novels written in English published in the UK or Ireland.
