Queen Consort Camila Awarded Booker Prize To Sri Lankan Author Shehan Karunatilaka

Shehan Karunatilaka authored the book The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Monday, 17 October. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a satirical afterlife noir set during Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. Camilla, Britain's queen consort presented the Booker Prize 2022 to Shehan Karunatilaka during a ceremony at London's Roundhouse concert hall.

Karunatilaka is a well-known Sri Lanka author, who won the 50,000 pounds ($57,000) award for his second novel. The 47-year-old has also done journalism and written children's books, screenplays, and rock songs. He became the second Sri Lanka-born Booker Prize winner, after Michael Ondaatje, who took the award for The English Patient in 1992. 

Booker Prize 2022 To Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is basically dark humour, in which a murdered war photographer investigates his death, and tries to ensure his life's legacy.

Karunatilaka on receiving the award, said, "Sri Lankans specialize in gallows humor and make jokes in the face of crises. It's our coping mechanism." He expressed that hope this novel about war and ethnic division would one day be "in the fantasy section of the bookshop."

The five-member jury read 170 novels before choosing a winner. The book was chosen for the Booker prize, as the book takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death.

Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, who chaired the judging panel claimed that the book is the ambition, the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution and that is why it deserved the prize. MacGregor added, "And there the reader finds to their surprise, joy, tenderness, love, and loyalty."

Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was in competition with five finalists including- The Trees of Percival Everett,  Oh William by Elizabeth Strout, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These and Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.

MacGregor pointed out that all the books explored the actions of individuals in a world "where fixed points are moving, disintegrating. What's striking in all of them is the weight of history. History as a player in contemporary politics is, I think, one of the things that emerge from most of the shortlisted books," 

Post-pandemic, this was the first fully in-person Booker ceremony and the first for longtime literacy champion Camilla since her spouse became King Charles III last month after the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth II. The event was also graced by singer-songwriter Dua Lipa. She delivered a speech on her love of reading, and a reflection from writer Elif Shafak on what the attack on novelist Salman Rushdie means for writers around the world.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 to honour British, Irish, and Commonwealth writers, and expanded in 2014 to all novels in English published in the U.K. It has a reputation for transforming writers' careers. The Promise by South Africa's Damon Galgut was last year's winner. | Booker Prize 2022 To Shehan Karunatilaka

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