Novelist Akhil Sharma’s 2014 novel Family Life has won the Folio Prize 2015. The 43-year old novelist beat writers like Irish novelist Colm Toibin and Scottish writer Ali Smith Coilm to win the £40,000 prize.
Family Life , Mr. Sharma’s second novel, took him 13 years to write and was selected by The New York Times as one of their Top Ten Books of the Year for 2014.
Calling the book “a novel that will endure,” William Fiennes, chair of the Judges, described Family Life as a “lucid, compassionate, quietly funny account of one family’s life across continents and cultures … a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility.”
It was one among the eight books shortlisted from 80 works of fiction and chosen as the best fiction published in the U.K. in 2014 by the 235 writers and critics who constitute the Folio Academy.
“It is a great honour,” Mr. Sharma told The Hindu over the phone. Writing it was “incredibly difficult” because it was “just hard to relive so many of these things,” he said. “I think of it as a sort of love song to my parents and to my brother.”
Mr. Sharma was born in Delhi and emigrated with his family to the USA in 1979. His first novel, An Obedient Father , won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
His stories have been published in The New Yorker and in TheAtlantic Monthly , and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Collections. He was named one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young American Novelists’ in 2007.
The Folio Prize recognises the best English-language fiction from around the world, published in the U.K. during a given year, regardless of form, genre or the author’s country of origin.
It is the first major English-language book prize open to writers from all over the world, which the other major book prize, the Booker has also done beginning this year.