(Colombo) Colombo on Tuesday congratulated Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the British Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida which resuscitates the bloody past of the island during the civil war.
Posted at 9:36
Government spokesman Bandula Gunawardana praised Shehan Karunatilaka, saying his “great achievement” had “brought honor to the country”.
The day before, the jury had praised “the breadth and competence, the audacity, the boldness and the hilarity” of the author, who thus saw his second novel crowned.
The book follows a playful, homosexual war photographer who, from the afterlife, tries to find out who killed him.
This darkly humorous murder case takes place in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in the 1980s, in the midst of the chaos of the civil war which ended in 2009 and left, according to the UN, at least 100,000 dead .
Sri Lanka’s armed forces are accused of war crimes by human rights defenders. They estimate that 40,000 Tamil civilians died in the last months of the conflict.
Gunawardana, also media minister, author and film producer, said the army prevented him from making a film about the 1990 assassination of journalist Richard de Zoysa.
“In the late 1980s, approximately 60,000 lives were lost. Because of the threats and intimidation, the intellectuals left the country”, he said, the assailants “entered the houses, made the journalists kneel down and killed them. »
“If this book is made into a movie, the new government won’t try to stop it,” he told reporters.
In London, receiving the award, Shehan Karunatilaka thanked his publisher Sort of Books for publishing this “weird, difficult, strange” book. He expressed his hope that “in the not too distant future”, Sri Lanka “understands that these ideas, of corruption, greed and cronyism do not work and will never work”.
The literary prize was presented to him in person by Britain’s Queen Consort Camilla, at the Booker Prize’s first public ceremony since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019.
Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, is the second Sri Lankan-born writer to win the Booker Prize, after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient.
The winner takes home the reward of 50,000 pounds (about $78,000) and the assurance of international fame.
Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood or Hilary Mantel, who died aged 70 last month, are among the writers who received the prize, which rewards novels written in English published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.