Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize, considered the U.K.’s most prestigious fiction award, for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. He is the second Sri Lankan author to win the prize, following Michael Ondaatje, who won in 1992 for The English Patient.
Karunatilaka’s win was announced at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, featuring appearances by singer-songwriter Dua Lipa and Camilla, the queen consort.
Karunatilaka’s novel follows a photojournalist who is murdered and wakes up in an afterlife where he’s given “seven moons” to lead two loved ones to a secret cache of explosive photographs.
“My hope for Seven Moons is this: that in the not-too-distant future, 10 years or as long as it takes, that it is read in a Sri Lanka that has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work,” Karunatilaka said in his acceptance speech.
Neil MacGregor, chair of the judging panel for the prize, praised “the ambition of [the novel’s] scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques.”
The other finalists for this year’s prize were Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, Percival Everett’s The Trees, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker.
The Booker Prize, which comes with a cash award of about $57,000, is awarded annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.” Past winners have included Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, Ian McEwan for Amsterdam, and Anna Burns for Milkman.
Published by Sort Of Books in the U.K. in August, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is scheduled for publication in the U.S. by Norton on Nov. 1.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
