Akhil Sharma
Birth—1971
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Akhil Sharma was born in 1972 in New Delhi, India. Subsequently, he moved with his family to Edison, New Jersey, where he grew up. His parents spoke Hindi exclusively while at home, and Sharma visited India every other summer during his childhood and adolescence. His strong ties to India and familiarity with the common culture provides the basis for his authentic portrayals of the details of everyday life in India that characterize his works.As a child, Sharma enjoyed writing and attempted to emulate the style of the science fiction writers he admired. He attended Princeton University where he received a bachelor of arts degree in public policy, but he did not abandon his love of writing and went on to study creative writing under such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, Russell Banks, and John McPhee.He then won a Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, where he won several O. Henry Prizes. He then attempted to become a screenwriter, but, disappointed with his fortunes, left to attend Harvard Law School.Sharma is an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark.
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, and was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name, which has appeared on the PBS series Independent Lens. Sharma’s first novel is An Obedient Father. 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 mostly autobiographical novel as “deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core.” 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. Family Life won the 2015 Folio Prize for fiction. Yet he described the 13-year process of writing the book as being “like chewing stones”. The author, who is currently writing a collection of short stories, bemoaned the time the novel took to write: “I’m glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn’t been the guy who wrote it.” Sharma, 43, continued: “I started writing this book when I was 30. I really feel I’ve shattered my youth.” Much of the book, which is about an Indian family’s move to America, is autobiographical, including an incident in a swimming pool which left his brother with severe brain injuries. Talking Back to Nabokov: An Interview with Akhil Sharma
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