London (Commonwealth Union)_Shehan Karunatilake was awarded the Booker Prize by the Queen Consort Camilla for his supernatural satire The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida which capture the brutality of the civil war through a unique story that translates the horrors of the murderous war.
The author said that his inspiration was drawn in the year 2009 after the war ended through a thought which allowed the dead to express their perspective, after the ongoing debate about the lives lost and who was truly at fault. As such the protagonist in the story, Maali Almeida is a dead photographer who requests his friends to broadcast his photos so the true cruelty and suffering endured as a consequence of the war could be unravelled.
Head judge Neil MacGregor praised the “scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and hilarity” of the novel, calling it an “afterlife noir” which “takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death”. The judges’ decision was a unanimous one as they collectively chose this story to be the winning one, making Shehan Karunatilake the winner of the Booker Prize presented with a cash prize of £50,000.
“My hope is that in the not-too-distant future… Sri Lanka has understood that these ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work,” said Karunatilake in his acceptance speech as he spoke about what inspired the story and how much he wishes for change as his nation rids itself of the curses of racism.
Overall, the story is a powerful piece of work delivering a profound perspective of the war, and one that should be read in order to understand what truly went down during the civil war that spanned 30 years and was the reason for a lot of brutality and bloodshed.
