Booker Prize 2022 voor Shehan Karunatilaka

De Booker Prize werd voor het eerst uitgereikt in 1969 en is sindsdien uitgegroeid tot de bekendste literaire prijs voor Engelstalige literatuur. Eerder wonnen onder anderen Damon Galgut (2021), Douglas Stuart (2020), Margaret Atwood (2019), Bernardine Evaristo (2019), Anna Burns (2018), George Saunders (2017), Paul Beatty (2016), en Marlon James (2015) de prijs.

De jury:

‘Any one of the six shortlisted books would have been a worthy winner. What the judges particularly admired and enjoyed in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. This is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ’the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life.

[...]

The book that we've chosen takes the reader on a journey at once horrific and humorous, beyond live and beyond death to the world's dark heart. And there, astonishingly and encouragingly, we find tenderness, laughter, loyalty and love.’ 

Bekijk de uitreiking, met een dankwoord dat deels in het Singalees gesteld was:

Dit was de shortlist:

• NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory [fragment]
• Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These [boekentip | fragment vertaling]
• Alan Garner, Treacle Walker
• Percival Everett, The Trees
• Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
• Elizabeth Strout, Oh William! [onze recensie | fragment vertaling]