Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. He tells us why the protagonist of his novel is a ghost, and why he chose to write about Lanka's civil war of the 1980s. He feels Lanka's recent chaos is nowhere near those terrible times when corpses littered the sides of roads, though he concedes that he draws from other people's experiences more than his own, as he was insulated by his class and education. Karunatilaka says it's a surreal feeling to have won the Booker and he still hasn't had time to speak to his family.
