How Shehan lifted the Booker winning plot
photo – (left) Rajpal Abeynayake, (right) Shehan Karunatillaka
By Inzi.
Why did the Booker Prize winner for 2022 steal a substantial part of his book — the main plot and more — and pass it off as his own? The answer is ‘you have to ask him that’, even though it’s possible he didn’t want to go through ‘seven years of hard work’ to write it on his own.
Anyhow, questions have abounded since our story yesterday of the plot being stolen. The valid and persistent question was, whom did he steal it from?
Today we have the answer to it. He stole it from Rajpal Abeynayake, a former editor of three national newspapers, Attorney at Law, and journalist.
‘He stole cynically and extensively. It is cringeworthy — extremely cringeworthy — when he now gives interviews to all and sundry about the plot, as if he was a local Salman Rushdie. It’s more like a cheap local salmon-tin robbery,’ Rajpal said.
Rajpal has all the evidence, and there are he says literally scores of similarities and some instances of almost identical text in his original untitled manuscript and the book by Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Mali Almeida. The systematic purloining has been of substantial aspects of the book, and not of trifling details.
Rajpal says he has all the evidence that Karunatillaka cynically set out to steal the plot, with express intent to cheat. ‘He has egregiously violated my copyright, and my moral right to the work,’ Rajpal said.
“Of course he should come clean at this point but he would be too cowardly to do that,’ Rajpal said. ‘It’s as if he borrowed my car for a ride, and now wants to claim it saying it’s his own.’
One thing is clear, Shehan K is a gigantic hypocrite. He makes cringeworthy, bombastic statements about this and the other right and the rights of Sri Lankans on all manner of things, but doesn’t have the elementary decency to respect the rightful owner of the Booker prize-winning plot, says Abeynayake.
Shehan has basically taken the Booker Prize Committee and all else involved for a ride, the owner of the untitled manuscript Rajpal Abeynayake told this site.
“The man is a nasty piece of work obviously to be so cynical, steal somebody else’s work and not even give the original author a smidgen of acknowledgment. At such a high-level of competition at that. On the other hand he is a joker too. He is way out of his depth making all those claims about his knowledge of local politics when he didn’t have the basic creativity to set his plot against a local political backdrop of unrest as the original author did,’ Rajpal said.
Rajpal’s manuscript is also set against a backdrop of mass killings, unrest and abductions etc in Sri Lanka.
‘Don’t steal the Moon’, Karunatillaka said sanctimoniously when a pirated copy of Seven Moons was circulating. Don’t steal the Moon indeed! —
(Rajpal Abeynayake said he doesn’t endorse pirated copies, even from an author who stole his book.)
