Novel by Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka wins Booker Prize

By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Writer Shehan Karunatilaka has won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” The book is an “afterlife noir” set during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. Karunatilaka won the 50,000 pound ($57,000) award for his second novel. He is the second Sri Lanka-born Booker Prize winner, after Michael Ondaatje, who took the trophy in 1992 for “The English Patient.” The book is a darkly humorous story of a deceased war photographer investigating his death and trying to ensure his life has a legacy. Chair of the judging panel Neil MacGregor said judges chose the book for “the ambition, the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution.”