Sharma wins 2015 Folio Prize

24 March 2015 Books+Publishing

Indian-American author Akhil Sharma has won the 2015 Folio Prize for his novel Family Life (Faber), reports the Guardian. The Folio Prize, worth £40,000 (A$75,865), is open to novels published in the UK, with no restriction on the writer’s country of origin or the genre of the work. Judge chair William Fiennes described Sharma’s novel, which follows an emigrant family’s search for the American dream, as ‘a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility’. It was chosen from a shortlist of eight that included Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (Penguin) and Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (Picador). The winner of the inaugural prize in 2014 was US author George Saunders for his short-story collection Tenth of December (Bloomsbury).

Category: International news