Few authors, after receiving a prestigious literary prize, wish they had not written the winning book. But Akhil Sharma, newly crowned winner of the Folio Prize, is no ordinary author – and the traumatic 13-year process of writing his acclaimed novel, he said, has left him “damaged”.
Folio prize
Indian-American writer’s winning book, Family Life, which took him 13 years to complete, is praised by head judge as ‘a masterful novel of distilled complexity’
The Indian-American writer Akhil Sharma has been named winner of the second Folio prize for fiction for a novel which took him 13 long and painful years to complete, charting one emigrant family’s heartwrenching search for the American dream.
Writing it, he admitted after receiving the £40,000 prize, was a frustrating, difficult challenge, often “like chewing stones” with around nine wasted years when it did not go well. “I’m glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn’t been the guy who wrote it,” he said.
Penguin Random House has announced that Akhil Sharma’s Family Life is one of 8 books shortlisted for the Folio Prize […]
The inaugural shortlist of the latest literary award on the block, the Folio Prize, has been unveiled – with a strong showing by American authors: BBC
The prize, open to English-language writers from all around the world, pre-empts this year’s Booker Prize, which is also expanding to a global level.
The final eight books – out of 80 read by the Folio judges – span poetry, novels and short stories.
After more than 40 years of unchallenged supremacy, is the Man Booker Prize, the so-called “Oscar” of the […]
