Booker Prize: Latest News

Colombo (News 1st) – Sri Lankan Writer Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Monday (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 ($57,000) 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.”Karunatilaka received the award from Camilla, Britain’s queen consort, during a ceremony at London’s Roundhouse concert hall.The judges’ unanimous choice, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is the darkly humorous story about a murdered war photographer investigating his death and trying to ensure his life’s legacy.Karunatilaka said Sri Lankans “specialize in gallows humor and make jokes in the face of crises”.“It’s our coping mechanism,” he said, and expressed hope that his novel about war and ethnic division would one day be “in the fantasy section of the bookshop.”Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, who chaired the judging panel, said judges chose the book for “the ambition, the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution.”“It’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death, right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world,” MacGregor said.

“The White Tiger” is roaring its way onto Netflix.

LONDON – Scottish writer Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for fiction Thursday for “Shuggie Bain,” the story of a boy’s turbulent coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow.Stuart, 44, won the prestigious 50,000 pound ($66,000) award for his first published novel, the product of a decade of work. He was the only U.K.-born author on a U.S.-dominated list of six finalists for the prize, which is open to English-language novels from around the world.A fashion designer who is based in New York, Stuart drew on his own experiences growing up gay in economically ravaged Thatcher-era Glasgow for the story of young Shuggie and his relationship with his alcoholic mother, Agnes.

LONDON – Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s novel “Lost Children Archive” won the Rathbones Folio Prize for literature on Monday at a ceremony held online because of the coronavirus pandemic.