As a boy living through Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s, Shehan Karunatilaka thought of political violence as part of the landscape. War was a constant backdrop to daily life, more mundane than frightening at times.

So when he had the idea for a novel about a Sri Lankan war photographer who wakes up dead, in an underworld populated with victims of political violence, he conjured up what felt like the most realistic version of the afterlife: a tedious, dysfunctional bureaucracy, where hordes of ghosts are waiting to be processed.

On Monday, that novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was awarded the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

“We admired enormously the ambition and the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution,” Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum and the chair of this year’s judges, said during a news conference.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was one of several political satires recognised by the Booker judges this year. The six finalists also included the Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory, a parable about an African dictator that features a cast of talking animals, and The Trees, Percival Everett’s blistering and darkly funny novel about a pair of Black detectives.

The judges, who were unanimous in choosing The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, were won over by “the variety of registers it was deploying, the skill with which language was used, and the confidence with which it shifted genre”, from noir to philosophical reflections to comedy, MacGregor said.

Karunatilaka was born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, and grew up in Colombo, the capital. He studied in New Zealand, and went on to work and live in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He has worked as an advertising copywriter and played the guitar in an alternative rock band, Independent Square.

He currently lives in Colombo, where he still writes ad copy during the day and works on his fiction in the early morning.

He appeared on the international literary scene in 2011, with the publication of his debut novel, Chinaman.

He first had the idea for the novel that became The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida in 2009. It was in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, as Sri Lanka was undergoing a national reckoning over the causes of the conflict and the unfathomable number of civilian casualties. Karunatilaka wondered what processing the lingering trauma of war would feel like if the dead could speak.

Though he was hesitant to write about the war, he started working on it around 2014. For a long time, he struggled with the tone.

He eventually cracked the narrative open as a dark comedy when he imagined the afterlife as a bland bureaucracy: “The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate,” he writes.

New York Times News Service