Shehan Karunatilaka

Karunatilaka grew up in Colombo, played drums in local rock bands, and worked for years in advertising across several countries before his 2011 cricket-fixing novel Chinaman won the Commonwealth Book Prize and established him as Sri Lankan fiction's most inventive comic voice.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) drops a murdered war photographer and closeted gay man into the bureaucratic afterlife of a Colombo caught inside the civil war, giving him seven moons to solve his own murder and steer the living toward photographs that could expose the war's atrocities: an audacious structure that lets Karunatilaka satirize gods, ghosts, and death squads in the same breath.

It won the Booker Prize in 2022, making him only the second Sri Lankan-born writer to win the prize, after Michael Ondaatje, and Karunatilaka has said he wrote its ghost-narrated fury as the only way he could face his country's unprosecuted war crimes directly.