Writer Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” a satirical “afterlife noir” set during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.
Karunatilaka, one of Sri Lanka’s leading authors, won the 50,000 pound ($57,000) award for his second novel. The 47-year-old, who has also written journalism, children’s books, screenplays and rock songs, is the second Sri Lanka-born Booker Prize winner, after Michael Ondaatje, who took the trophy in 1992 for “The English Patient.”
Karunatilaka received the award from Camilla, Britain’s queen consort, during a ceremony at London’s Roundhouse concert hall.
The judges’ unanimous choice, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is the darkly humorous story about a deceased war photographer investigating his death and trying to ensure his life’s legacy.
Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, who chaired the judging panel, said judges chose the book for “the ambition, the scope and
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