Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize for his second novel, 'The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.' Karunatilaka spoke with TIME about the unexpected win and how Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war relates to present-day political struggle and economic hardship
hen Shehan Karunatilaka got the call from his ecstatic agents that his second novel,, had been longlisted for the Booker Prize, he was grateful but didn’t dwell on it too much.
His winning novel unfolds as a murder mystery, where the protagonist Maali Almeida, a recently deceased war photographer, wakes up as a ghost and has seven days to identify his killer. The story takes place in the late 1980s, during the early years of Sri Lanka’s devastating 1983-2009 civil war that pitted the Sinhalese-led Sri Lankan government against the separatist Tamil Tigers.
We’re always wary in Sri Lanka. We’re having a moment of freedom of expression, with people on the street shouting everything they can about the ruling party and slaying them with jokes on the internet. But that wasn’t always the case.Sunday Leader The war ended in 2009. And though there were unhealed wounds, one side clearly won [the Tamil Tigers were defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces in May 2009].
In July, then-President Rajapaksa was forced to step down amid protests. Did this represent a turning point for Sri Lanka?
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