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Singapore Writers Festival 2024: Shehan Karunatilaka says Haw Par Villa inspired Booker Prize novel
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Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida heaves with ghouls and demons that are not out of place in a gruesome Haw Par Villa diorama.
PHOTOS: SORT OF BOOKS, COURTESY OF SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA
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SINGAPORE – Sixty-six names appear in the acknowledgements section of Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize-winning novel, but one curious credit on the seventh row will leap out at the Singaporean reader: Haw Par Villa.
“It’s the craziest park I’ve seen and its depictions of demons were a big influence on the texture of The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida (2022),” says the author in an e-mail about the whodunnit, which follows the ghost of a photojournalist in a bureaucratic afterlife.
