Whanganui Collegiate School old boy awarded school’s highest honour after winning Booker Prize

2022 Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka returned to Whanganui Collegiate School to be honoured with the school's highest accolade.

A Whanganui Collegiate School old boy who won the 2022 Booker Prize has returned to his former school urging students follow their passions.

Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award for fiction written in English, for his second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

The book follows the story of Maali Almeida, a war photographer who wakes up in the afterlife and looks to solve his own murder amid the background of the brutal Sri Lankan civil war.

Karunatilaka was born in Galle, Sri Lanka, and attended Collegiate between 1990 and 1992.

He returned to Whanganui for the 1991 to 2000 school reunion and was presented with the school’s highest honour, the Whanganui Collegiate School Honours Tie.

During the ceremony at the school’s Prince Edward Auditorium, he gave a speech detailing his experience of his time at WCS.

For the first year, he said he found it a lonely place where he didn’t fit in, mostly due to fellow students not having an understanding of his Sri Lankan background and his lack of skill in sports.

His speech was dedicated to “the kids that just don’t fit in, the less popular kids”, and he said the thing they do every day would be the thing they succeed in, and it was their life mission to find what brings them joy.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

Karunatilaka said he wrote because he didn’t want a job where he had to wear a tie, and it’s still thrilling to be paid to write, the thing he loves most.

Collegiate headmaster Wayne Brown said Karunatilaka reaching the pinnacle of his profession by age 48 was astounding.

“Whanganui Collegiate School is suitably proud of Karunatilaka as an old boy,” he said.