The Booker Prize 2022

In news– Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize recently for his second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a dead war photographer on a mission in the afterlife.

Key updates-

Set in 1990 Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war, ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ by Shehan Karunatilaka is the story of a war photographer, who dies and later waked up dead at a celestial visa office.
Here he has ‘seven moons’ to give a try and in turn solve the mystery about his death.
In the process he also helps in unveiling a cache of photos that have a tendency to rock war-torn Sri Lanka.

About the prize-

The Booker Prize which was first awarded in 1969 is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.
The winner receives £50,000(around 46 lakhs) as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
Both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales.
When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel —a change that proved controversial.
A five-person panel constituted by authors, librarians, literary agents, publishers, and booksellers is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation each year to choose the winning book.
A sister prize, the International Booker Prize, is awarded for a book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
Past winners of the Booker Prize include Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie(Indian-born British-American) and Yann Martel.
The first Indian to win the ‘Booker Prize’ was Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy was awarded the ‘Booker Prize’ in 1997 for her novel ‘The God of Small Things‘.
Other Indian’ who won the prize include-Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss and Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger.