Tell us about the research process.
The Civil War is quite well documented. I made notes of all the unsolved murder cases and I also spoke to people who were in the army at the time: ex-Tamil Tigers who were living in exile, and people who I knew who had grown up in Jaffna. I talked to my wife who came from the plantations. Her family had a harrowing time [when the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a former militant organisation in Sri Lanka, was the ruling power in the country].

Then I had a bigger problem, which was to figure out what the afterlife looks like. Because there aren’t many ghosts you can interview unless you’re clairvoyant. So I went to all the major religious [sources, and I also watched] horror movies, visited haunted houses, and read Dante and accounts of near death experiences where they talk about the light. In the end, I realised I had to make up my own scenario, but make sure it had its own internal logic.

Are you religious?
I grew up a Sinhala Buddhist, went to an Anglican school and now I meditate. My wife is Christian and my kids are brought up Christian. My mum’s quite a religious Buddhist and my in-laws are Christian. I’m exposed to a lot of that stuff.

Maali Almeida is a character who is a much braver, more idealistic version of myself. I grew up in the Colombo bubble [away from the war]; I didn’t see any need to do anything about the horrible things apart from writing a novel about it 30 years later. But Maali actually went to these war zones and took photographs. His view, which you see in the book quite overtly, is that after seeing so many atrocities, there cannot be any order to this universe, there cannot be a god or deity presiding over these horrible things. He believed that the universe was random. That’s why he is a gambler. I’m sympathetic to that view.

What is the key message of your novel?
I didn’t start with a message. I realised I was trying to explain to myself why Sri Lanka, this beautiful paradise island filled with potential, has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Even within recent history. After the war ended, we thought it was a period of great hope and that the country will now build and be unstoppable, but ten years later, we were bankrupt. I’ve heard lots of explanations: corrupt politicians or the country is cursed. So the book is my stab at explaining why there are lots of these restless spirits who can’t get to the afterlife and whispering the fact that we don’t address our past and move on to the next atrocity.

Tell us about the editorial reasons behind the different editions.
We went through many incarnations. Initially in 2015, I wrote a book called Devil Dance, which is a slasher-horror set during the 2004 tsunami and how on a bus aid workers get knocked off one by one. I [wrote] 300 pages but couldn’t make it work. The only thing that survived from that draft was the ghost on the bus, which was a war photographer called Maali Almeida. Then I wrote a version called Chats with the Dead, which I finished just before the pandemic. It’s very similar to Seven Moons. I got a number of offers from [Indian publishers from] the subcontinent, perhaps because Chinaman was quite a hit in India.

But during the pandemic, there wasn’t much enthusiasm in western publishing circles for Chats. In the UK and the US, even people who published my first book found this quite confusing. The concerns were mainly that no one remembers 1989 and the complicated political situation and [the factions involved]: the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam], the JVP, the government and the special task force. So in this version, you get a chapter which clarifies what these abbreviations mean and who’s doing what in this in this ecosystem of violence. The other one was to clarify the sort of supernatural elements in India. In the east, the idea of rebirth, hungry ghosts, demons and seven moons is part of our culture, but I had to clarify what that meant for western readers. We ended up just tinkering with a lot of things, taking out plots and subplots that weren’t quite working, meshing characters together, maybe developing [the characters]. Finally, by the end of 2021, it was ready. It’s a murder mystery, a political thriller, there’s a love triangle, a ghost story, and a lot of philosophising.

Why did you write this novel in English?
In Sri Lanka, there are three main languages: Tamil, Sinhala and English. I’ve only been taking Tamil lessons since last year. English was the language I [used when I] was employed as a copywriter at an ad agency, and the majority of my reading is done in English, so I wrote in English, for that simple reason.

Sri Lankan literature has these silos, and we’re hoping to break these barriers down. Sri Lankan English writing gets the most attention, and these are the books that get published internationally. And then you have Sinhala and Tamil writing, but it just seems like we’re not aware of each other’s literatures. I’m hoping with this book or win, I can remedy that at least by getting my work translated into Sinhala and Tamil.

Who are your target readers?
A target audience is a tough one because when you’re writing in Colombo or about cricketers and civil wars that people have forgotten about, you don’t expect to be published in the UK or the US. Now after Booker Prize, I suppose with my next book, I can be arrogant with this global audience. But all these years, I’ve been writing for an audience like myself: Sri Lankans, people in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. I’ve travelled around the subcontinent on book tours, and I realised a lot of similarities between our dystopias. I was thinking of readers who lived in South Asia and who can relate to that.

Tell us about writing in the second person.
I was trying to solve the problem of what a ghost or disembodied voice sound like. I can describe what his body is, being chopped up in the first chapter, and I can describe what he used to look like. But what is the sound like? Then I arrived at the idea that if anything survives the death of your body, it’s perhaps the voice in your head. For me, the voice in my head is in the second person. I’ve asked a few people, and I’m not alone in my madness that the voice in my head is like someone else telling you, ‘you idiot, why did you do that?’

There aren’t many examples of novels [written] in the second person, and I was aware that it was challenging. But the idea seemed to flow: we all think our thoughts come from ourselves. But sometimes I’ve had the experience where I wonder if someone else put that thought in my head. So this idea that there are spirits hovering around whispering things in your ear come about.

How has India writing evolved?
A generation ago, perhaps Sri Lankan writers were trying to write like and please Englishman who lived a century ago. When I was growing up [in Sri Lanka before migrating to New Zealand in 1990 to escape the troubled times], there weren’t many Sri Lankan books in the bookshop, and the ones that were seemed quite derivative. Now, I feel that South Asia has its own voice. We have our own stories, and we’re quite proud to write in [our] style. To the west, we say, come read our stories, you might learn something.

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Who are your idols?
In India, there are plenty of inspirational figures: Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth who are writing books that were winning big prizes and were part of the western canon. But Carl Muller, who is less celebrated internationally, was for me a big inspiration because he wrote these tales about the Buddha community in Sri Lanka in a very Sri Lankan voice.

A lot of us South Asian writers owe a lot to Salman Rushdie because [he spearheaded] the idea that you could write in your own voice. There were also a lot of writers in the region that gave me confidence that even my silly story about a left arm cricketer spin bowler is worth writing about. I tend to go for these comic absurdist writers: Kurt Vonnegut is the guru uncle Kurt. I read eight of his nine novels—I’m rationing them out carefully.

There’s also Douglas Adams, George Saunders, Margaret Atwood. Their works are very easy to read and very humorous, even though they’re writing grim, depressing topics.

George Saunders was a big inspiration, especially since he wrote a talking ghost Booker Prize-winning novel while I was writing mine. When he won, I thought, ‘Oh, man, they’re not going to tolerate another talking ghost book.’ But apparently there’s room for lots of talking ghosts books in the world.

How did you end up becoming a writer?
I finished high school in New Zealand, and I did college there. My typical Asian dad wanted me to study accounting and economics, which I did first year. Gradually, I started adding history, philosophy, sociology and all that. I didn’t tell him till I was due to graduate with an arts degree. I did business too. I’m still interested in economics and marketing, and that was my career, and I drifted into advertising up till a couple of months ago. It’s sort of a creative profession.

Then around 2007, I had this idea about this genius cricketer, who played for Sri Lanka and was forgotten. I thought someone should write it, and I knew no one was going to write it. So I [started waking] up at four in the morning and work on the manuscript before I went to office. [It would turn out to be Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew in 2010.]

What future writing projects do you have in mind?
I learnt in my 20s not to talk about things that I haven’t written. I would write five pages and brag to everyone that I’ve written five pages, and then I never wrote another page. So it’s best to shut up and just write the thing. [All I can say is] I’m writing about Sri Lanka. My first book was set in 1996 to 1999; Seven Moon is 1989 and 1990; my third book will be set in the early 2000s. It won’t be a ghost or cricket story.

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