Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the 8th Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for the French translation of his novel “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”.
According to the Sri Lankan Embassy in France, Karunatilaka was awarded the French literary prize by the Guimet Museum on June 05.
“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, was 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.”
“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” also won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2022.
