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Context: Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, published in the subcontinent as Chats with the Dead.

Details:

• He is only the second Sri Lankan to win the prestigious £50,000 after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient.
• The book is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ‘the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justifies every human life.’
• Karunatilaka is one of contemporary South Asia’s most exciting writers. He burst on to the literary scene with Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which he self-published in 2010, before it was picked up by Penguin Random House and launched in 2011.

The winning novel:

• Set in 1989, at the heart of a vicious and long-drawn civil war in Sri Lanka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a whodunnit set in the afterlife and came a decade after Karunatilaka’s feted debut.
• War photographer Maali Almeida wakes up dead in what appears to be a bureaucratic office in the afterlife, even as his dismembered body is dumped in the Beira Lake in central Colombo.
• He has many problems of his own — he is a gambler, a closeted gay, and he has no clue about who his murderer is.
• As he races against time trying to solve his own murder mystery, what emerges is a satirical tale of a chaotic country, torn asunder by violence and held together along its frayed edges by the complicated commitment of men like Almeida.

About International Man Booker Prize:

• It is awarded annuallyfor the finest single work of fiction from around the world which has been translated into English and published in the UK and Ireland.
• The International Booker Prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize.
• The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the prize money divided equally between the author and the translator. 
• This prize aims to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world, and has already had an impact on those statistics in the UK

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-culture/sri-lankan-author-wins-booker-meet-shehan-karunatilaka-and-maali-almeida-8215686/

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