The Booker Prize 2022 has been awarded to the novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka. That was announced Monday evening during a ceremony in London, which the BBC broadcast live. The Booker Prize, awarded annually to an English-language novel, is one of the most influential novel prizes in the world. The laureate receives an amount of 50,000 pounds (58,000 euros) and the book invariably achieves bestseller status.
Karunatilaka (1975), who wrote three novels and a children’s book, tells in his novel about a murdered photographer during the Sri Lankan civil war. In the magic-realistic story, the photographer must secure the evidence of political settlements in seven days after his death. The jury said they were impressed by “the ambition of the scope, and the hilarious audacity of the storytelling” of the novel.
‘Weird, difficult and peculiar’
The novel, which has not yet been translated into Dutch, was, in the author’s own words, “weird and difficult and idiosyncratic,” he quoted in London as the publishers who rejected it. It originated as a political ghost story, the author recently told the British newspaper The Guardian. “It seemed to me that only the dead could provide a logical explanation for the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living apparently had no idea.” Tens of thousands were killed in the civil war, in which government forces waged a bloody battle against the Tamil Tigers between 1983 and 2009.
The violence in the country is still barely recognized by the authorities. “My hope for Seven Moons is that in the not-too-distant future, the book can be read in a Sri Lankan that corruption, racial hatred and favoritism have not worked and never will,” Karunatilaka said in his acceptance speech. He also expressed the hope that his novel will be “read in a Sri Lanka that learns from its history,” and that Seven Moons will one day be “in the fantasy section of the bookstore, not mistaken for realism or political satire.”
The Booker Prize jury this year showed a marked preference for novels with political subjects in general and satire in particular. Three of the six nominated novels, including the winner, offer a satirical enlargement of a political-social subject, as does the novel The Trees by the American Percival Everett, about a series of racist murders in Mississippi, culminating in comedy-horror in which the dead rise from their graves. The American-Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo wrote with the novel Glory an Animal Farm-esque satire on the politics of long-ruling Robert Mugabe – imagined through animals.
The nominated novella Small Things Like These by Irish writer Claire Keegan was inspired by the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church; Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic. The last of the six nominees was the oldest in the history of the award: writer Alan Garner, who turned 88 on the day of the award, who wrote the little novel Treacle Walker wrote, about a boy who discovers a magical world in a forest and in his comic books. Last year the prize went to the South African Damon Galgut, for his book The Promise (The promise).
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