London: Indian-American author Akhil Sharma on Thursday won the prestigious 1,00,000-euro International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest award for a single novel, for his second novel Family Life.
The Delhi-born New Yorker has already bagged the 2015 Folio Prize worth 40,000 pounds for his autobiographical novel that tells the tale of how a family moves from Delhi to New York, where the older brother has an accident that leaves him brain-damaged and in need of 24-hour care.
“I got the email telling me I had won, my first thought was ‘thank God, another disappointment avoided’. It hurts when you don’t get something, so I was just relieved to not have pain,” the 44-year-old author told The Guardian in Dublin.
Sharma was named the winner from an initial list of 160 nominations by a panel of judges including novelists Ian Sansom, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Carlo Gébler.
