The booker award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, was awarded this year to the novel The Seven moons of Maali Almeida, written by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunathilaka.
His second novel is based on questioning the trauma of the Sri Lankan civil war that lasted for more than 3 decades.
‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ is one of the few political satires recognized by the Booker judges this year.
The Booker Prize is considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature.
This is the first time that a Sri Lankan has received this award.
After receiving the award, Mr. Shehan Karunathilaka concluded his remarks on the stage as follows. “Let me tell Sri Lanka this. I wrote this book for them. This is a victory at a time when the country is defeated. It doesn’t matter that we lost to Namibia recently. People in Sri Lanka are suffering a lot today. I have no weapons to suffer that pain. But let’s accept this victory. Now let’s win the World T20 Cup anyway, why not?.. Thank you!
Neil McGregor, former director of the British Museum and this year’s Booker jury chairman, told a news conference: “We absolutely admired the ambition, the scope and the skill, the boldness, the humor of the presentation. It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through life and death.”
Among the six finalists were Zimbabwean writer Violet Bulawayo’s ‘Glory’, a novel about an African dictator complete with talking animals, and Percival Everett’s ‘The Trees’, about a pair of black detectives investigating a series of murders that echoed the killing of Emmett Till.
As a Sri Lankan writer, previously Michael Ondachi, a well-known novelist who was born and spent his childhood in this country, then went abroad also received this award. However, he is known as a Canadian writer.
