″I don’t particularly want to be a controversial writer,” says Shehan Karunatilaka. He doesn’t even want to be a political writer, really. But his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which was awarded the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction on Monday, can’t escape the politics of Sri Lanka’s violent past.
“I began wanting to write a murder mystery and a ghost story,” he says. It was in the many thousands of unsolved murders of his home country that he found apt material.
