I won a literary lottery: Shehan Karunatilaka on Booker

'I am obsessed with luck and chance and randomness seems as good a way as any to explain the universe,' says Shehan Karunatilaka

For an island nation battered by unrest and turmoil, Shehan Karunatilaka's Booker win came as a big victory amidst several big defeats. One of Sri Lanka's brightest stars, Shehan wears his fame and adulation lightly. Sample how he introduces himself on his website: "Booker-winning writer of punchlines, manifestos, and calls-to-action. Failed cricketer, failed rockstar, failed vegan. Observer of people, machines and markets. Does not know how to use semi-colons; and unable to spell diarrhea without assistance."

Shehan's first triumph on the global literary stage was the Commonwealth Book Prize, which he won in 2011 for his debut novel, 'Chinaman'. Incidentally, it was also declared the 'second-best cricket book of all time' by Wisden. One of the Booker judges described this year's prize-winning work, 'Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida', as a "deeply humane novel about how to live in intolerable circumstances". But don’t all writers tell stories about the overused, overwritten, and overwrought topics of the everyday? Don’t they all draw inspiration from their land’s histories, mythologies, and geographies? By using them, don’t they all convert the personal into universal? Then what makes Shehan’s fiction different — isn’t he also going about the same quest for explaining “the world’s madness”? And what does fiction do anyway? DHoS posed a volley of questions at Shehan, who candidly replied to each one of them with his trademark wit. Excerpts from an interview

You must’ve been answering what the Booker win means to you. If you can perhaps think of anything that it doesn’t mean to you.

That’s a fresh one. Firstly, it doesn’t mean I wrote the best book of the year. Or even the best book on the longlist. It just means that I won a literary lottery. Five judges happened to choose mine and I’m forever grateful to all of them. But it doesn’t mean that the next book will be any easier to write. Though it might mean it will be read by a few more people.

Given the crisis the island country is in, what does the Booker win mean to her in your view?

I’m not sure. I have had an outpouring of love from Sri Lankans all over the world. I guess Sri Lanka needs any sort of victory these days, especially when we’ve suffered so many defeats. I hope it means more Sri Lankans will write and more will read. That more will share their stories and listen to the tales of others. If nothing else, it shows we can be world-class at more than just cricket, tea, and turmoil.

You noted in an interview for the Booker Foundation that you contemplated a lot before writing a queer character now, compared to the time you started working on 'Chats with the Dead'... I wanted to know if you believe that everyone must be able to tell any story they want to, irrespective of their lived experience...

I think the only stipulation should be that you do it with empathy, respect, and skill. The idea of fiction is to inhabit the minds of other beings, for both the reader and the writer. But if you do it lazily or offensively, you should be ready for the flak. That said, I see no value in placing visa requirements on a writer’s imagination and legislating the stories that they are allowed to tell.

In 'Seven Moons', you’ve mentioned the "birth lottery" often. Perhaps you were working on 'Birth Lottery' at that time, but I wanted to enquire about your obsession with this phenomenon — the randomness of birth and the privileges it grants to some and/or takes away from others. Also, the titular short story has 42 such birth lottery entries. Just wondering if there was any reason behind stopping at 42 because the story otherwise could have been endless.

I suppose I am obsessed with luck and chance. Randomness seems as good a way as any to explain the universe. Forty-two is an auspicious number for fans of Douglas Adams, but you’re right, that story could stretch to infinity, and for some readers, it may feel that it already does. I had to cover 2,000 years at roughly two lives a century, so 42 made mathematical sense as well. Though the central question in the story is whether karma operates on a cosmic level or not at all. I think there are enough clues in the 'Birth Lottery' that point to an answer.

What makes the weird collection that 'Birth Lottery' is a collection in your view?

Not much, other than the fact that all the stories are about Sri Lanka and are written by me. I did try out different forms and voices and enjoyed the eclectic nature of the offerings. After working on two big novels featuring a single narrative point of view, I relished the opportunity to try on different hats for shorter periods. Though it’s perhaps more a compilation than a concept album.

Were you trying to experiment with the short-story form by having, say, a set of prefaces to a book be called a story? I ask this because of the several notions about storytelling and fiction that demand a story to be told in a particular way. Were you wanting to, in any way — if you had originally thought of it as that — dismantle the hegemony of the narratives around storytelling, too?

There are a number of conventional stories in the collection, but you’re right, there is also flash fiction, sci-fi tales, stories in the form of text messages and online posts, and yes, one made up of prefaces to a lost book. That one, 'Assassins Paradise', was inspired by a J G Ballard story called 'The Index', which told the tale of an extraordinary life through the index of an unread biography. I think, in the era of the smartphone, short stories can take many forms, so I tried to embrace a few new ones.

If you believe in such a concept, what do you think is the role of a fiction writer?

To tell good stories. I think that’s it really. If you want to hang other things on it, you may. But that’s the basic job description. We’re not here to replace the historian, the philosopher, the psychologist or the reporter. Though we can imitate each of them at various times. We may use stories to smuggle ideas into readers’ heads, but that only works if we get the story bit right.

And lastly, why do you write fiction?

Good question. It’s because screenwriting can break your heart, copywriting can swallow your soul and songwriting requires finding drummers, singers, and producers. Fiction is difficult and takes time but isn’t reliant on collaborators to execute an idea. I think I prefer games that can be played without other people.

Review: Big wars and small miracles

Eclectic, idiosyncratic, and exceptional. These adjectives easily describe Shehan Karunatilaka’s latest book, a collection of short stories, 'The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises' (Hachette). This literary work sparkles because it deviates from the established notions of writing short fiction and yet again demonstrates the author’s distinct ability to blend the mythological, psychological, and physiological in his humorous prose. Much like its literary predecessor, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize 'The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida' (Sort of Books, UK), which was published two years ago in India as 'Chats with the Dead' (Hamish Hamilton).

'Birth Lottery' borrows many a theme explored fully or tangentially in 'Seven Moons'. Sample this sentence: “You think of the lottery of birth and how everything else is mythology, stories the ego tells itself to justify fortune or explain away injustice.” Or this: “Perhaps that is where all car accidents originate. Bored spirits putting drivers to sleep, skidding their tyres and cutting their brakes.” And lastly, “The odds of winning the lottery are one in eight million. The odds of dying in a car are one in four thousand. And, according to Mr Kinsey, the odds of being born homo are one in ten.”

From the ‘birth lottery’ determining one’s life’s trajectory to the probability of surviving a car crash to the need for telling stories, Shehan engages with the everyday and the unknown in equal measure. While liminality in prose is a trademark of the Sri Lankan writer, among his many talents is his distinct usage of the English language. He did it well enough by writing in the second person a whodunnit story of a dead queer photojournalist Maali Almeida, who comes alive only in the afterlife, in Seven Moons.

He tries it anew in 'Birth Lottery'. 'If You’re Sad and You Know It (Suicide Prevention Rhyme For Children Aged 35 And Over)' and 'Assassin’s Paradise' from the collection are cases in point. In more ways than one, he has secured an undisputed place for himself by rendering a witty turn to not-so-likeable situations, the island country’s political history, the unsettling decades of the civil war, and its contemporary politics.

While it may not be gripping in the colloquial sense — a quality that’s preferred over anything and is increasingly gaining currency in this world that’s so time-constrained to read, the collection grows on you.

A stream of stories

Interesting from page one, Birth Lottery’s epigraph reads: “None get to choose where they are born. Many try to steal the credit.” From this chuckle-worthy yet thought-provoking note, Shehan goes on to provide a primer to his readers to access the book, providing reasons for each choice. For example, for the titular and unusual short story written in the form of vignettes describing the fate associated with a random number in a lottery of birth, he writes, “If you like stories that everyone hates, start with The Birth Lottery.”

Many stories in this collection don’t prefer the overexploited human-centric, window-to-the-soul type of narrative engine. Several engage with the increasing interaction of humans with artificial intelligence. And a few also dabble with highbrow concepts yet remain rooted in the common denominators of human existence: the binaries we’ve constructed to make sense of ourselves in this wild, wild world — love and hate, question and answer, man and woman, profit and loss, life and death, pride and shame, success and failure, truth and false, and, above all, real and imaginary.

The very first short story titled 'A Self-Driving Car’s Thoughts As It Crashes' demonstrates, in my view, many of Shehan’s obsessions in fiction writing: probability, a game of chance. Then, there’s 'Easy Tiger' — a story told in chats between an unfaithful husband and his rather clever wife, and 'The Ceylon Islands', which asks whether “killing children [is] necessary or even acceptable as a means to an end.” There are also some wonderful sentences that’ll have you in stitches. A sneak peek: “Sri Lankans work harder than anyone else, as soon as they are taken out of Sri Lanka.” Or the multi-intentioned tagline in 'Small Miracles': “Sri Lanka. Small miracle.” And then there are some real, uncomplicated facts rendered in fiction that only a writer who has seen many a turmoil in his beloved land can spell out. Sample this: “Big wars are won by carpet-bombing civilians. Why? Because it works.”

The interviewer is a Delhi-based writer and independent journalist who writes about books, gender and sexuality. Find them on Instagram and Twitter as @writerly_life