BackAkhil Sharma wins Folio prize, says wishes someone else wrote his book
'The book itself is good. I just wish someone else had written it. Writing it was like having to chew stones,' said Akhil Sharma
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London: It took him 13 years to write and publish it, or as he puts it, “my 30s", but US author Akhil Sharma won the second annual Folio literary prize and £40,000 ($59,752) on Monday for his novel Family Life.
Sharma, 43, was selected from a shortlist of eight authors for the prize for his semi-autobiographical novel about an Indian family that immigrates to the US and the tragedy that “turns their American dream" into a “nightmare" when one of their sons is severely brain damaged following an accident.
He draws on personal experience. He was born in India and left for the US with his family when he was younger. His brother was involved in an accident that left him brain damaged.
“This friend of mine began dating a woman and soon after she got sick so he began taking care of her. He was there for her at the hospital, put the hospital bed together; he was there for her when she died," said Sharma.
“He was with her for five years and he said ‘I don’t really love her that much. I’m glad somebody was there because it’s awful to be sick alone; I just wish I hadn’t been the poor schmuck’ and I have that same feeling towards the book."
An investment banker turned novelist, Sharma was born in Delhi and emigrated to the US in 1979. His stories have been published in the New Yorker and in Atlantic Monthly, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Collections. His first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
He spoke of his gladness that the book was receiving attention because it highlighted the important and often overlooked role of care-givers.
“The book itself is good. I just wish someone else had written it. Writing it was like having to chew stones," he said.
The award’s sponsors say it is intended to recognise “the best English-language fiction from around the world" that has been published in Britain, regardless of form, genre or the author’s nationality.
“Family Life is a masterful novel of distilled complexity, about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility," British author William Fiennes, the chair of the judges, said in a statement announcing the winner of the prize founded by the Folio Society, a publisher of deluxe classic books.
The other 2015 shortlisted titles were:
10:04 by Ben Lerner (Granta)
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Faber)
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Granta)
Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Granta)
How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
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