Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 8th Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for his novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”.
According to the Sri Lankan Embassy in France, Shehan Karunatilaka was awarded the French literary prize by the Guimet Museum on Thursday (05 June).
Musee Guimet honoured “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, translated from English by Xavier Gros and published in French by Calmann Lévy in 2024.
The president of the Guimet Museum, Yannick Lintz, in a statement, praised the work’s “literary invention of universal dimension” and “the modernity and radicalism of its writing.”
Karunatilaka’s novel, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, also won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2022. His cricket themed debut novel “Chinaman: The: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew” won the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2012, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and the Gratiaen Prize in 2008. “Chinaman” was declared the second-best cricket book of all time by Wisden. (Newswire)