Seamlessly combining realism with fantasy, Karunatilaka takes readers on a crazy ride marked with dark humor and satire. Maali, described as a “photographer, gambler, slut”, cannot fathom the cause or the nature of his death, and is worried about a set of photographs of war crimes carried out by the Sri Lankan government in the early years of the country’s 1983-2009 civil war.

Maali wants to reach out to his lover DD and his friend Jaki to safeguard the pictures, but how can a ghost communicate with the living, especially with a time restraint of seven moons? His soul has only a week to complete the mission. Shifting between present and past and between the dead and the living, Karunatilaka goes on a wild riot of imagination.

“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is the only work by an Asian writer on the shortlist of six finalists for the 2022 Booker Prize, the prestigious UK-based literary award. The winner will be announced in London on Oct 17.

Karunatilaka grew up in Colombo and studied in New Zealand before working for more than 20 years for advertising agencies and multinational companies. He has written for “The Guardian”, “Conde Nast” and “National Geographic”, and his debut novel “Chinaman: the legend of Pradeep Mathew”, published in 2010, won the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize.

“The Seven Moons” has a complex history. It was shortlisted for Sri Lanka’s Gratiaen Prize in 2015 under the title “Devil Dance”, and published in an earlier form as “Chats With The Dead” in 2020. Gearing up for a global audience, the book went through further edits and made the Booker longlist of 13 books under its current title before its UK launch.

“Every time I put out a piece of writing, I steel myself against disappointment,” Karunatilaka told Nikkei Asia. “Not that I’m a pessimist, but I prepare myself for the real possibility that the text may disappear without finding an audience. I remind myself that I did my best, blame bad luck, and move on to the next.

“I was in this state when the Booker news arrived. What a tremendous longlist and shortlist to be part of, and what a way to launch a book that struggled at first to find an international publisher. I feel blessed.”

The idea for the book emerged in 2009 in postwar Sri Lanka. The death of Richard de Zoysa, a well-known journalist, actor and poet who was abducted and killed in 1990, was the trigger for Maali’s character, and Karunatilaka began writing the novel in 2014.

“Maali evolved across many drafts into a character who was less the activist and thespian that Richard was, and more of a hedonist, hustler and nihilist,” said Karunatilaka, who initially attempted to narrate the story in the third person.

“I was trying to imagine a disembodied voice of a ghost and tried out many clichés before I settled on the second person. I imagined the only thing to survive your death would be the voice in your head, and the voice in my head is mostly a second person.”

Were other characters also drawn from life? “I suppose they are. The book evolved many times. It’s hard to remember who was drawn from what. They all surprised me.

“Jaki and DD turned out to be smarter and more resourceful than I thought they would be,” Karunatilaka said. “The villains grew more sympathetic, and some of the ghosts stole the show, especially the Dead Leopard, who I believe to be the hero of the book.

He added: “Minor characters like the cops and the thugs do remind me of folks from my neighbourhood, though I don’t recall consciously basing them on anyone specific.”

Insulated from war

Growing up in Colombo, largely insulated from the horrors of war, Karunatilaka shared Maali’s guilt of being trapped in a bubble. It was while researching for the book that he read about the events of the late 1980s and collected some firsthand accounts.

Once an aspiring cricketer, Karunatilaka recalls playing for an under-13 team in the 1980s and taking four wickets in a match. “Most of my cricketing career was spent stuck at third-man (an unexciting fielding position) or in the scorebox, dreaming of the perfect cricketer that I would become,” he said.

However, his dreams found another outlet when he wrote “Chinaman”, using the traditional term for a form of left-arm bowling that has since been deemed inappropriate by the world’s cricket authorities. In 2020, London-based Wisden Cricket Monthly judged “Chinaman” one of the world’s four best books on cricket.

Karunatilaka also wrote the screenplay for “800: The Murali Story”, a film biography of Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan. Known as Murali, he was the first bowler to take 800 wickets in Test matches, the most prestigious form of cricket, despite repeated claims that his bowling action broke the sport’s laws.

However, the film has not been released because of political controversy within Sri Lanka.

“Murali occupies a curious place among cricket fans and Tamil people,” Karunatilaka said. “He’s the game’s highest wicket-taker, though some still believe his action to be illegal. He was the lone Tamil on the national team during a time of war.

“Many consider him a race traitor. This was the character we wanted to capture in the screenplay as authentically as we could. Even though Murali read our many drafts, he never tried to censor or edit us.”

Karunatilaka, who also writes for children, has recently released a collection of short stories called “The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises”. Other recent children’s titles include “Those Sneaky Plants” and “I’m Never Ever Going to Sleep”.

“I have started work on my third novel and a documentary script,” said the writer, who counts Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje among his literary heroes. When not writing, Karunatilaka plays guitar, piano and harmonica, and has bought a drum kit.

He added, however, that his principal ambition is for his homeland to allow a new generation of leaders to create a peaceful and prosperous future, and for Sri Lankans scattered across the globe to bring their talents and ideas home.

“It’s a big dream,” he said. “We’ve all been waiting far too long for it.”