Sri Lankan author wins the Booker Prize 2022 with dark, satirical novel

Writer Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Oct 17 for The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida, a satirical "afterlife noir” set during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.

Karunatilaka, one of Sri Lanka’s leading authors, won the £50,000 pound (RM268,000) award for his second novel. The 47-year-old, who has also written journalism, children’s books, screenplays and rock songs, is the second Sri Lanka-born Booker Prize winner, after Michael Ondaatje, who took the trophy in 1992 for The English Patient.