Born in 1975, Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan author who won the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. The book was recently shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2023. His debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010), won the Commonwealth book prize and was declared the second-best cricket book of all time by Wisden. He has also penned an anthology of short stories, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises (2022). Karunatilaka has lived in New Zealand, London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He currently resides in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.

In this interview, conducted in February on the sidelines of Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) 2023, Karunatilaka talks about writing a novel in the second person; capturing the turbulence of Sri Lanka’s long civil war in literature; and the importance of discipline in a writer’s life. Excerpts:

The News on Sunday (TNS): What inspires you to write, and what does your typical writing process look like?

Shehan Karunatilaka (SK):Hmm, I never ask myself this. [Pauses]. I think it’s more like a compulsion. I feel like the day’s wasted if I don’t write. If I go a week without writing, I feel like I am wasting my time. There are two projects that I have been working on since before the Booker Prize: a third novel and two [kids] stories, maybe even a screenplay. For me, the daily [writing] practice - the rhythm of it - is an essential.

I typically wake up at 4am. I go to bed at around 8pm with my kids, who are 8 and 6 years old. Then three hours before the kids wake up, I do the bulk of whatever [I’m working on]. Usually, the first part is research. For my first novel, Chinaman, I watched cricket matches, took notes, crafting this guy’s career. With The Seven Moons, there was a lot more research. Currently, I am in the research phase for my third novel. I spend a lot of time just filling up pieces of paper with notes because the blank page is scary. I also keep notebooks for ideas.

The toughest part is the first draft. I find it tough to begin and get to a point where I think I’ve done enough research and should now make up a story and pursue it. I don’t have a big plot mapped out; I just do scenes and that process can take one, two, or three years. I hope to do it in six months, but it never works out. I had many false starts with The Seven Moons. I rewrote the thing about four times. But once I got the [first] draft – I think I was there in around 2018 – when I had the beginning and the arc and knew what the story was about, I spent two years editing it. So you have to have that rhythm because you kind of lose track if you write just once a week or once every couple of days. It is through the process of getting stuck and then resolving it that [the writing] happens. So I start at 4am, then drop the kids at school in between and write till around noon. Then I can spend the afternoon reading, watching movies and not thinking about writing. That’s my ideal day. Usually, I’m still at my desk at 5pm, cursing myself that I didn’t meet my deadlines. But in a nutshell, that is it.

TNS: Does writing every day help with writer’s block?

SK: There are good and bad days, whatever job you have; [be it] manual labour, intellectual work, etc. You turn up on a Monday; maybe you didn’t sleep properly, you’re hungover, or something is bothering you. When you label it writer’s block, it becomes like you have a cold, like a problem you need to solve, [when] you’re just having a bad day. Suppose you need to write a scene. Do you know enough about the situation? Maybe you should read something. If you’re writing a gruesome scene, maybe read some Cormac McCarthy. Just don’t leave the desk. That’s the worst, I think. Keep sitting there. Or make notes, do something. Then when work is over, you leave and have a good night’s sleep, which is very important. And [if] you do that every day, I guarantee that by Thursday or Friday, you’ll have a page. When you’re starting out, you get discouraged. You’ve sat there for three weeks and just have a few bad pages to show for it. You think, maybe the story is not working, maybeI am not a writer, but these are just voices in your head. I know from experience that if you keep going and by the third or the fourth week, if you have a voice that’s flowing, that’s time well- spent.

TNS: You use the second person as the primary narrative perspective in The Seven Moons. How did you come to that decision?

SK: A book doesn’t exist till you have a voice. You have ideas, but it’s only when you have a voice that the writing begins. That was the case with Chinaman, and all of my short stories, even articles. I started The Seven Moons in the third person, then went to the first person, and then [asked myself]: What does Maali Almeida sound like? I know he has woken up in this afterlife that he didn’t expect, with amnesia, not sure what to make of his own life. So I was thinking, okay, I can’t describe him. He’s disembodied.

My theory was this: the thing that perhaps survives your death is the voice in your head. I think that was the idea. [With] the voice in your head, you sometimes wonder if that voice is you or someone else whispering. It is always in the second person. Why did you do that?Why didn’t you wake up earlier? It’s always like someone is talking to you. Once I hit on that, I just started writing and the pages started flowing. It’s only later that I thought, where do the whispers come from? Do the thoughts originate with you, or are they coming from someone else? The second-person [narrative] allowed me to play with that idea. Also, the ‘you’ telling the story and Maali in the flashback are not the same person. I feel the ‘you’ telling the story was like Maali’s soul or conscience. I don’t know. This is the stuff I intellectualised later. I chose the second person while writing the novel and it seemed to work. So I went with it.

There are good and bad days, whatever job you have. When you label it writer’s block, it becomes a problem you need to solve when you’re just having a bad day.

TNS: I was intrigued by your portrayal of the complex relationship between Maali and Sri Lanka in The Seven Moons. What was your approach to it? And would this depiction resonate with most readers from the subcontinent?

SK: I always say that The Seven Moons, at its heart, is a murder mystery. There are many suspects. If you’re looking for an in-depth analysis of 1989 and the political situation [during that period], I don’t think The Seven Moons gives it. It’s a very on-the-surface analysis. All it says is that these are the factions [….], and they become fascists and lose sight of their causes and goals. That is Maali’s view. He is a nihilist and an atheist. He’s not apolitical; he just believes there isn’t anyone worth voting for. Maybe I share some of his views. But I didn’t think of writing a political novel though I know it’s been construed as such. I wasn’t sitting there thinking; this is the manifesto I want to share, other than for Sri Lankan readers to know that we made so many obvious mistakes and continue to make them. If there was any message at all, it was that 1989 seems so long ago but have we emerged as a united Sri Lanka that doesn’t divide itself? Certainly not. I think that is all that I was looking for. There are similarities, especially in the case of the subcontinent. Look at Pakistan’s experience, Nepal’s, Bangladesh’s, or India’s. There’s a lot they can relate to, I think. But I don’t know if there was a message other than that. Maybe we need some new ideas because these old ones have been recycled and haven’t worked for us.

TNS: Given the significant role that cricket plays in Sri Lanka and the subcontinent in general, did it feel like a natural step for you to write about it in Chinaman?

SK: That was the whole idea. I was in my 20s when Sri Lanka won the World Cup, so that was the height of it all. We were all swept up in the emotion, and cricket became a national obsession for a few years because we were finally world-class at something. So I wanted to write about that. I was writing [the book] in 2007-8 when the war was still raging. We didn’t know when it would end, and I just wanted to write a story about Sri Lanka that didn’t mention the war because all the stories were about the war and ethnic conflict. I wanted to write something about 1996 to 1999 when we were the best in the world at something, and the whole world looked at us not with pity or disgust but with admiration. So I think it was interesting for me to write a story that didn’t mention the war. I can’t solve climate change or economic collapse, so I might as well watch the cricket and make sure my family is okay [instead of] worrying and getting worked up [about things]. I think I overcompensated for it in The Seven Moons, where the war is all that is mentioned.

TNS: You use morbid humour to describe the afterlife through the character of Maali. What led you to decide that?

SK: So my first book, Chinaman is also about a guy drinking himself to death. But it’s a funny book because he sees the world in a kind of cynical, skewed way. I think I pick narrators who have this sarcastic sense of humour. It also helps because otherwise, it would be quite depressing. Maali seems to have a [dark] sense of humour. He’s a gambler; everything is a calculated risk [with him], so it’s almost like [he’s] making jokes in the face of fate. Humour seems to be the natural voice. He’s dead, someone chopped up his body; and he’s commenting on how his hair looks. This character just seems interesting, and that’s why I did it. Also, humour or satire is a device. I am inspired by Mohammad Hanif and [books like] A Case of Exploding Mangoes. It seems that satire tends to get under the radar in places where there isn’t freedom of speech in journalism, as it seems innocuous. But I didn’t use it as a device. It just came naturally as a part of the tone, but I think maybe I am attracted to narrators with that kind of sick sense of humour.

TNS:The Seven Moons took a slightly different creative approach from Chinaman, incorporating elements of magical realism and a more experimental narrative structure. What inspired you to take this direction?

SK: I think both the books are quite conventional in that they follow very specific genre tropes. Chinaman is a missing person’s story and just follows the murder mystery genre. The second novel is a bit different as there is a political discussion and a ghost story, but I didn’t set out for it to be experimental. Even my third novel is a fairly conventional story, but who knows? Once I’m done with it, maybe it will turn into something different. I suppose in my short story collection, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises, you can see a lot of experimentation that was intentional. You get stories told with text messages, stories that are told from the point of view of an animal or even a science fiction story. So I did try on different things for that. But with the novels, I think they just naturally evolved to have all these different layers. For example, The Seven Moons is not just a murder mystery; it becomes a political thriller because of the photographs under Maali’s bed. Then the contents of the photographs turn it into a historical political commentary; there is also this whole mythology about the afterlife.

TNS: What are your thoughts on literature in English being produced in the subcontinent?

SK: When I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, there wasn’t much Sri Lankan writing on the bookshelves. I mean, at least I didn’t see a lot of it. And then suddenly, we had this golden period in the ’90s with Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera and others, which coincided with [a similar boom happening in] India and Pakistan. I think now the readership and the population are big enough for us to write stories for. I think we [in the subcontinent] don’t need to write for the West. We can write for ourselves as we have plenty of untold stories and enough conflict. These stories can’t be told [by anyone else but us]. Like, I definitely know no one would’ve written a story about a left-arm leg spinner.

Hopefully, publishing will follow suit and will be able to make these available widely, at least in translation, across the region. If we just have Tamil and Sinhala literature translated into English, that’ll be a huge step for Sri Lanka. And then it’s like that across the region too, for example, in the case of Urdu and Bengali. English is the link language since we [get to] read [authors like] Arundhati Roy and Mohsin Hamid and, I guess myself. I think I get read more than the Sinhala writers. So I think there is a great opportunity; it’s where the publishing can take a step forward and see it through, but there are certainly a lot of stories that can be told.

TNS: The Seven Moons draws inspiration from Sri Lanka’s civil war while blending fiction and fantasy. How did the war affect you personally?

SK: I grew up with bombs going off, assassinations, curfews and checkpoints everywhere, but I knew there were many other people in the country who had a much more harrowing time than me. I wasn’t too aware of it when it was happening. I realised this only later when the guilt of being in the Columbo bubble made me research and talk to friends who grew up in the plantations. I think I was quite sheltered from it, but I suppose growing up under war affects you even though I didn’t suffer like most of my countrymen did.

TNS: Did your experience in advertising provide you with unique perspectives or skills as a writer?

SK: Advertising has been my day job until recently. Having a day job is great because it takes the pressure off; you’re not under obligation to produce a book every couple of years to pay the bills. But also, in advertising, you’re forced to come up with ideas whether you want to or not. In addition, you need to have something by a specific deadline. So techniques of coming up with ideas, crafting ideas, and just turning up to work every day help. I still begrudge advertising because corporate life gets quite depressing, but I have to be thankful because I think I carried over some of the discipline from that gig.

TNS: Sri Lanka has bravely faced two major disasters, the civil war and the 2004 tsunami. Will the country be able to recover from the current economic downturn as well?

SK: We got out of these disasters, but we suffered a lot in the process. Did we learn from those? Have we healed all the wounds? I’m not sure we have. I am not sure we are very good at learning from our past, and that’s why I get cynical every time there’s a false [hope]. Sri Lanka is a small country. I don’t know how big the economy is, but a big corporation in America will [probably be able to] manage it, so the problem is not insurmountable. It’s a beautiful country with so much potential. With the right people at the helm, Sri Lanka’s problem is certainly solvable, at least with the new generation.

Our generation is quite apathetic, but this generation is cynical. When these kids protest, there isn’t any gender bias; all genders are [being represented]. All these groups embracing pluralism gives me hope, but it is still to be seen whether this new generation is allowed into politics or if it will be the same old men running things.

The interviewer is a staff member