Congratulations to Shehan Karunatilaka who has been named the winner of this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him.

At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Neil MacGregor, 2022 chair of judges, comments: ‘Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. This 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 justify every human life.’

Karunatilaka was shortlisted alongside NoViolet Bulawayo (Glory), Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These), Alan Garner (Treacle Walker), Percival Everett (The Trees) and Elizabeth Strout (Oh William!).

The Booker Prize for Fiction is a £50,000 prize literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. Shehan Karunatilka is second Sri Lankan author to win Prize. You can read more about the prize here.