Booker Prize winner lets ghosts of Sri Lanka’s past speak

Shehan Karunatilaka wrote his Booker Prize-winning novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” to give voice to Sri Lanka’s dead. He hoped the ghosts of the country’s bloody past could speak to its troubled present.When the book became a finalist for the 50,000-pound ($58,000) fiction award this summer, protests over a deepening economic crisis gripped Sri Lanka.

An uneasy calm had returned by Oct. 17, when Karunatilaka’s novel won the prestigious prize, catapulting its author to literary stardom.

“Surreal” was the word Karunatilaka used to describe edging out finalists who included Americans Percival Everett and Elizabeth Strout with his novel about a war photographer who wakes up dead. Stranded in a bureaucratic limbo of an afterlife, Maali Almeida has a week – seven moons – to discover who killed him and retrieve a trove of photos to secure his legacy.

The book is set in 1989, during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil