“After hearing about Rushdie, I deleted one of my stories about Islam.” The Booker Prize winner’s confession

After stabbing the Nobel Prize in New York, the writer of “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, Shehan Karunatilaka, said he had self-censored

Shehan Karunatilaka’s book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, is the classic novel that Booker Prize judges adore: an epic set against the backdrop of a civil war (in this case in Sri Lanka), a gay photographer, a some supernatural thriller, ghosts of Tamil child soldiers and a small publisher who believes it after the grown-ups rejected it. Karunatilaka wrote the book of the year, then. However, in his Booker acceptance speech on Monday night, Karunatilaka referred to Salman Rushdie’s recent stabbing in New York and claimed to have censored himself. “I had written a story about a radicalized Maldivian teenager for a collection I was preparing and my wife suggested that I remove it. All it takes is one person who takes offense and suddenly you are an Islamophobic writer. So yeah, these things are in my head. There is a feeling that if you are middle class and write in English, you are probably safer. But from Charlie Hebdo onwards it became a real problem ”.