Booker Prize winner lets ghosts of Sri Lanka’s past speak

By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Shehan Karunatilaka wrote his Booker Prize-winning novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” to give voice to Sri Lanka’s dead. He hoped the ghosts of the country’s bloody past could speak to its troubled present. Karunatilaka won the prestigious $58,000 prize on Oct. 17 for his novel about a war photographer who wakes up dead and has only a week to find out who killed him. The book is set in 1989, during Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. But Karunatilaka says it has plenty of resonances for a country that even now has not come to terms with its past. He says he set out to write “a ghost story where the dead were allowed to speak.”