Booker’s Karunatilaka: ‘You don’t know who you’re going to offend’

Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka on growing up amid civil war, turning trauma into satire, and winning this year’s prize.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger

Oct 20, 2022 – 8.27am

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″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.

New Statesman