His book was published in August this year.
Owner of this year's Booker Prize strong> became Shehan Karuntilaka for the novel “Seven Months of Maali Almeida”. He became the second writer from Sri Lanka to be awarded the Booker, according to the award's website.
“Each of the six shortlisted books would be a worthy winner. What the judges especially liked about The Seven Months of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scale and the cheerful audacity of its narrative techniques. This metaphysical thriller, the noir of the afterlife, dissolves the boundaries not only of different genres, but also of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. This is quite a serious philosophical game that takes the reader to the “dark heart of the world” – the bloody horrors of the civil war in Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, love and loyalty, striving for an ideal that give meaning to human life,” said the head of this year's jury, Neil McGregor.
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Shehan Karuntilaka is one of the most famous authors of Sri Lanka. He burst onto the world literary scene in 2011 when he won the Commonwealth Book Award, the DSL and the Gratien Prize for his debut novel The Chinese.
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The winning novel is about Maali Almeida, a military photographer who was killed and passed out in a mysterious place similar to a “divine visa center”. He has no idea who killed him, but even in the afterlife, his time is running out. Almeida has “seven months” to lead the man and woman he loves most to a hideout with photos “that will shock Sri Lanka”. The events of the novel take place during the civil war in Sri Lanka.
