Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the prestigious 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’, an afterlife thriller set against the backdrop of the country’s brutal civil war.

Karunatilaka, 47, became only the second Sri Lankan-born novelist to win the £50,000 literary prize at a ceremony in London on Monday night, after Michael Ondaatje who won for ‘The English Patient’ in 1992.