The government denounced, in passing, the censorship which weighed on the country exercised by the army for years.
Colombo on Tuesday congratulated Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of Britain’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida which resuscitates the bloody past of the island during the civil war. Government spokesman Bandula Gunawardana praised Shehan Karunatilaka, saying his “big success” had “brings honor to the country“.
The day before, the jury had hailed “breadth and skill, audacity, boldness and hilarityby the author, who thus sees his second novel crowned. The book follows a playful, homosexual war photographer who, from the afterlife, tries to find out who killed him. This black humor 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. Bandula 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.
“At the end of the 1980s, approximately 60,000 lives were lost. Due to threats and intimidation, intellectuals left the country“, he said, the attackers “entered houses, made journalists kneel down and killed them.» «If this book is made into a movie, the new government won’t try to stop it.“, he assured reporters.
In London, receiving the award, Shehan Karunatilaka thanked his publisher Sort of Books for publishing this book “weird, difficult, strange“. He expressed his hope that “in the not too distant future“Sri Lanka”understand that these ideas of bribery, greed and cronyism don’t work and never will“.
The literary prize was presented to him in person by British Queen Consort Camilla, on the occasion of the first public Booker Prize 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 wins the reward of 50,000 pounds (about 60,000 euros) and the assurance of international fame.
Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood or Hilary Mantel, who died last month at 70, are among the writers who received the prize, which rewards novels written in English published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
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