Akhil Sharma | |
---|---|
Born | Delhi, India | 22 July 1971
Occupation | Novelist, professor |
Education | Princeton University (BA) Stanford University J.P. Stevens High School |
Notable works | An Obedient Father (2000) Family Life (2014) |
Notable awards | Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (2001) Folio Prize (2015) International Dublin Literary Award (2016) |
Akhil Sharma (born July 22, 1971) is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life , won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
Born in Delhi, India, he immigrated to the United States when he was eight, [1] and grew up in Edison, New Jersey, where he graduated from J.P. Stevens High School. [2] Sharma described experiencing racism in school and in the city: "people cursing at us in the street, and being spat at at school." [3] Sharma's teenage brother was in a pool accident that left him in a thirty-year coma, an incident that forms the basis of Sharma's semi-autobiographical novel, Family Life. [4] Sharma studied at Princeton University, where he earned his B.A. in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. While there, he also studied under a succession of notable writers, including Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, John McPhee, and Tony Kushner. He then won a Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, where he won two O. Henry Awards (1995 and 1997). [5] He then attempted to become a screenwriter, but, disappointed with his fortunes, left to attend Harvard Law School.
Sharma went on to become an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark. [6]
Sharma has published stories in The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , The Quarterly , Fiction , the Best American Short Stories anthology, and the O. Henry Award Winners anthology. His short story "Cosmopolitan" was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1998 , [7] and was also made into a 2003 film of the same name, which has appeared on the PBS series Independent Lens . [8]
Sharma's first novel was An Obedient Father for which he won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. [6] Sharma's second novel, Family Life was published by W. W. Norton & Company in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in the U.K. in April 2014. The New York Times described the semi-autobiographical novel as "deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core.". [9] David Sedaris noted that "[e]very page is alive and surprising, proof of [Sharma’s] huge, unique talent." Sharma wrote about the 13 years it took to write Family Life in an essay on The New Yorker's website. [10] Family Life won the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction and the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. [11] [12]
He shares office space with the writers John Wray, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Alice Sola Kim. [13] He and Wray had previously been part of an informal writing group that includes Gary Shteyngart, Suketu Mehta, and Ray Isle. [14]
In July 2017, Norton published Sharma's collection of short stories, A Life of Adventure and Delight.
Sharma and his first wife, Lisa Swanson, met in law school and married in 2001. [15] [16] They later divorced. In 2020, Sharma married Irish psychologist Christine Mulligan, [17] with whom he has a daughter. [18]
Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
"The Blue Umbrella Man" | 1990 | Sharma, Akhil (Summer 1990). "The Blue Umbrella Man". The Quarterly (14): 153. | ||
"A Heart Is Such a Heavy Thing" | 1997 | Sharma, Akhil (November 30, 1997). "A Heart Is Such a Heavy Thing". The New Yorker. | A Life of Adventure and Delight | |
"Prosperity" | 2000 | Sharma, Akhil (June 11, 2000). "Prosperity". The New Yorker. | excerpt of An Obedient Father | |
"Surrounded By Sleep" | 2001 | Sharma, Akhil (December 2, 2001). "Surrounded By Sleep". The New Yorker. | A Life of Adventure and Delight and basis of A Family Life | |
"Mother and Son" | 2007 | Sharma, Akhil (Spring 2007). "Mother and Son". Granta. 97. | excerpt of A Family Life | Granta 97 theme: 'Best of Young American Novelists 2' |
"We Didn't Like Him" | 2013 | Sharma, Akhil (June 3, 2013). "We Didn't Like Him". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 16. pp. 56–61. | A Life of Adventure and Delight | |
"A Mistake" | 2014 | Sharma, Akhil (January 12, 2014). "A Mistake". The New Yorker. | excerpt of A Family Life | |
"A Life of Adventure and Delight" | 2016 | Sharma, Akhil (May 16, 2016). "A Life of Adventure and Delight". The New Yorker. | A Life of Adventure and Delight | |
"You Are Happy?" | 2017 | Sharma, Akhil (April 10, 2017). "You Are Happy?". The New Yorker. | A Life of Adventure and Delight | |
"The Narayans" | 2024 | Sharma, Akhil (August 26, 2024). "The Narayans". The New Yorker. | ||
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
John Henry O'Hara was an American writer. He was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his work was praised by such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his champions rank him highly among the major under-appreciated American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level.
Roderick Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Mohsin Hamid is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West (2017), and The Last White Man (2022).
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is the co-founder and President of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit. He is also a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling." Among his numerous honors are the U.S National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Prize, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her short stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published eight novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
An Obedient Father is a 2000 novel by Akhil Sharma. It received the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and Whiting Writers' Award. Set during the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the story is about a corrupt and loathsome bag man who lives with his daughter and granddaughter in a New Delhi slum. The novel started as a short story that was previously published.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Family Life is a 2014 autobiographical novel by Akhil Sharma. Set in 1978, it tells the coming-of-age story of an eight-year old Indian boy named Ajay Mishra living with his recently immigrated family in New York City. The story develops around his older brother Birju, who suffers a life-changing accident, and how the family copes with the incident.
Sally Rooney is an Irish author and screenwriter. She has published three novels: Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). The first two were adapted into the television miniseries Normal People (2020) and Conversations with Friends (2022).