“Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.”
This statement is central to Shehan Karunatilaka's book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, it's a wonderful novel full of life, love, death, laughter, angels, ghosts and devils, in which the afterlife is a bureaucracy.
Set in 1989, Seven Moons is the story of a murdered a war photographer, loosely based on the life of Richard de Zoysa. Maali Almeida 'wakes up dead'. He has seven moons to choose his eternity and to get his photos into the hands of the living. Karunatilaka's book imparts both delight and horror, using satire to describe the upheaval, betrayal, murder and afterlife of the citizens of Sri Lanka during the civil war of 1983 to 2009.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Karunatilaka, who recently returned to Aotearoa as The Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury, spoke with fellow Sri Lankan-Kiwi Brannavan Gnanalingam, winner of the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award Best Crime Novel for his book Sprigs (Kudos to Brannavan for a perfect introduction in Te reo Māori.)
Karunatilaka grew up in Aotearoa and studied at Massey University Wellington, then travelled, including a visit to his homeland before returning to experience a Canterbury winter.
As they spoke about Shehan's first book, Chinaman, which won the 2012 Commonwealth Prize, Karunatilaka, demonstrating the wit that's evident in his writing, commented on the surreal fact of a Tamil and a Sinhalese writer talking together not far from Colombo Street.
Chinaman is the legend of Pradeep Mathew, Sri Lanka's unsung cricketing hero. Did Karunatilaka play cricket?
While he hasn't achieved his dream of being a left arm spinner for Sri Lanka, he did play for Massey, he says. Perhaps we might see him on the Hagley Oval? Shehan quips that he has met enough Sri Lankan Kiwis to form a cricket team, but what to call them? 'New Lankans? Sri Zealanders?'
Why a cricket story?
In 2007 Sri Lanka won the Cricket World Cup two years from the end of a twenty-five-year war they thought would never end. There aren't many novels written about cricket, says Karunatilaka, but he found his voice; writing a story only he could tell, of a drunken sports narrator looking for evidence of a legend who has been lost from historical records, as many were during the war.
Which character does Shehan prefer?
Maali Almeida is a bit of a self-obsessed golden boy, he says, but WG from Chinaman "is a man I could hang out with. ...WG has the solution to all the world's problems but will fall asleep after the third drink."
When he became sick of book talks about cricket, he wrote Seven Moons - which after winning the Booker generated even more endless book talks. He needs to stop doing festivals and finish some writing, he jokes, hinting at a new book going to his publisher in a few weeks.
Why the disembodied journalist?
Maali is written in the second person - referring to himself as 'you'. This reinforces the feeling of detachment from the living world.
Originally the central character of a murder mystery called Chats With the Dead, Maali was the only ghost left on a bus full of bodies. "It takes just as long to write a bad book as a good one", he says - readers found the politics and folklore hard and his publisher gently said the beginning was confusing, the ending didn't land, and the middle was boring, with a lengthy and truly disgusting scene of body parts being fed to cats (Karunatilaka has a thing for Hammer Horror). So Maali got rewritten as it is today.
Karunatilaka threw the book 'into the the whole mess' of Tamil separatists, Indian Peacekeepers (the IBKF), the Marxist uprising (the JVF) and political oppression because, like de Zoysa, he wanted to tell the victim's story of limbo - as opposed to what he calls 'the battle of documentaries', with their conflicting facts and statistics. He set it in 1989 instead of 2013 so that 'all those offended would be dead.'
How does the book sit with the reckoning, the Sri Lanka of today?
In the futuristic, optimistic, modern Sri Lanka, with no more checkpoints, Karunatilaka says there is not much memorialising of the past. Maali is a photographer because 'we see the same three photos on the internet' leaving the telling up to theatre, cinema and fiction. This is perhaps where (writers) are useful, says Karunatilaka, in bearing witness to the past.
"If we forget, then this will happen again."
In Sri Lanka today, you can take a ride around Beira Lake. In the eighties, the lake gave off the stench of dead bodies. Luxury apartments have been built over sites where 'terrible things happened.'
Are you working on new projects, and are there characters and themes that resurface in these?
Maali, himself a rewrite, has callbacks to Chinaman. The character of Jonny from Seven Moons may pop up in his next book. The theme of 'who is behind events? Is anyone behind the wheel? is a constant, paired with the use of humour to describe painful subject matter - coming out through the character's voice.
'Kiwis are deadpan', says Karunatilaka. 'In Sri Lanka, whenever a politician tried to steal the narrative, they'd be turned into a meme, a cartoon, or auto-tuned. The Sri Lankan smile is a device to hide behind.'
"This island is a beautiful place, despite being filled with fools and savages.”
More
Shehan Karunatilaka is appearing in three more WORD events this festival; I Wish I Wrote That, Home Again: Jon Toogood and Emergence book launch, while readers can also hear Brannavan Gnanalingam in Zines with Bryce Galloway, and Small Press, Big Impact with Damien Levi, Laura Borrowdale and Murdoch Stephens.
- Read books by Shehan Karunatilaka
- Read books by Brannavan Gnanalingam
- Shehan Karunatilaka wins 2012 Commonwealth book prize
WORD Christchurch Festival 2026
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