2022 Booker prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka talks about melding fact and fiction in his sophomore book

When Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize for The English Patient in 1992, he used a portion of the prize money to establish a trust that would support a new generation of writers in his native Sri Lanka. Named after his mother, the Gratiaen Prize is awarded annually to manuscripts from a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, creative prose and literary memoir. In 2008, freelance copywriter Shehan Karunatilaka won it for his debut novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. This year, 20 years after Ondaatje’s win, Karunatilaka put Sri Lanka on the literary map once again by winning the Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Both his books have much in common — set in Sri Lanka, and in a time pre-dating the present — but the most outstanding aspect of Karunatilaka’s writing is the clever dovetailing of fact and fiction. Chinaman uses cricket as a device to write about Sri Lankan society, telling the story of an alcoholic journalist’s quest to track down a missing cricketer of the 1980s. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a ghost story set in the late 1980s against the background of the civil war that ravaged the island republic. Its protagonist is a dead photographer who has just seven days to reach out to his friends in the realm of the living, get them to retrieve a set of photographs and share it with the intention of exposing the brutalities of battle.