Booker Prize Winner 2022

The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction was announced today, with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka receiving the £50,000 prize for his novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. 

Set in 1989, in Colombo, Maali Almeida is a war photographer, gambler and closet queen. He wakes in the afterlife to find that he has been killed but has no idea by whom. He has seven moons to contact his loved ones and alert them to some important photographs. 

The judges said of this novel: 'Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic'.

Karunatulka is the second Sri Lankan author to win the Booker Prize (the first was Canadian/Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient in 1992). 

His previous works include Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010) and Chats with the Dead (2020). He has also written features for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Guardian and other publications.

Chair of the Judging panel, Neil MacGegor, said of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida:

'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 technique. This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not juts of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west...'

Here is the moment that the winner was announced and the award was presented to Shehan Karunatilaka by the Queen Consort.

I have not yet read this novel but I havre heard great things about it from readers I admire, so will have to find a copy and check it out.