Booker’s Kiwi link

After a New Zealand education and accolades for his sport-themed first novel, Shehan Karunatilaka has won the big one.

- MARK BROATCH

This year’s Booker Prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka, went to school and university in New Zealand. Sri Lanka-born Karuna-tilaka took home the Booker for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. He boarded at Whanganui Collegiate and studied for a BA in English literature and a postgrad diploma in business administration at Massey University in Palmerston North. He’s rumoured to be returning to New Zealand next year.

Booker chairman of judges Neil McGregor said the novel, a supernatural satire set amid Sri Lanka’s civil war in 1990, was an afterlife noir that dissolves the boundaries not just of different genres, but of life and death, body and spirit, east and west”. The book takes readers on a journey at once horrific and humorous, beyond life and beyond death, to the world’s dark heart. And there, astonishingly, and encouragingly, we find tenderness, laughter, loyalty and love.”