Akhil Sharma is A native of Delhi but resides in New York City. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
The New York Times described the semi-autobiographical novel as “deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core”.
Sharma wrote about the 13 years it took to write Family Life in an essay on The New Yorker’s website. Mother and son and We didn’t like him are his short stories
Even though born in India he immigrated to the United States when he was just eight years old. He graduated from J.P. Stevens High School. He took BA from Princeton University specializing in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School.
He studied under a succession of notable writers, including Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, John McPhee, and Tony Kushner.
After winning the Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, he won two O. Henry Awards (1995 and 1997).
Sharma went on to become an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark.
