And what do you Dua? Camilla and pop queen’s night out at the Booker
IT was the moment the Queen Consort came face to face with the queen of pop at a celebration of fiction last night.
Book-loving Camilla was there to present the Booker Prize, the foremost award for novels published in English.
Singer Dua Lipa was there to make a brief speech and broaden the appeal of the prestigious literary award.
Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, won the £50,000 prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
Set in 1990 with Sri Lanka locked in civil war, the surreal novel follows Maali Almeida, a closet gay war photographer who wakes up dead in what seems to be a visa office in the afterlife.
By way of explanation, the author said that Sri Lankans ‘specialise in gallows humour and make jokes in the face of crises... it’s our coping mechanism’.
The last time a Sri Lankan author won
the Booker was Michael Ondaatje with The English Patient in 1992.
Karunatilaka’s debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, won the Commonwealth Prize 11 years ago.
Former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, who chaired the judges, said of the winner: ‘It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as “the dark heart of the world”.’
The other shortlisted works were Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, The
Trees by Percival Everett, Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout and Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. Had he won, Garner, at 88, would have been the oldest winner.
Dua Lipa attended as part of an effort to broaden the prize’s appeal.
Gaby Wood, director of the prize’s foundation, said : ‘Perhaps not every book will be for everyone but any of these books could be for anyone.’