Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka: 'Sri Lanka has seen so many false dawns'

The Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka has lamented the state of Sri Lanka today after natural disasters, poor economic management and political failure pushed his island nation home to the brink of collapse.

Speaking to The National at the Sharjah International Book Fair, Karunatilaka, 47, said the peril his nation faced quickly vanished from the headlines shortly after protests caused the last government to fall in July.

“We have had a tsunami, we've had the Easter attacks, we have an economic collapse,” he said.

“It is just that I have lived in Sri Lanka for over 40 years, and we've had so many false dawns.”

A cost of living crisis, medicine shortages and the continuing lack of foreign currency to import goods threatens to leave millions starving, the UN said this week.

On Monday, President Ranil Wickremesinghe set out his first budget since taking office in an attempt to turn around the economy by late 2023.

Karunatilaka's book The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set in war-torn Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, centres on a dead war photographer who has seven days to solve his own murder. It won the Booker Prize in October.

 

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