Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American novelist born in 1971 in Delhi, India, who immigrated to the United States with his family as a child. He studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School and worked as an investment banker before becoming a full-time writer. His debut novel An Obedient Father (2000) won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Family Life (2014, W. W. Norton) is his second novel, based on his own family's experience — his brother suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a swimming pool accident when Akhil was nine, and the family's life was consumed by his care for decades. The novel follows the Sharma family from Delhi to New Jersey in the late 1970s, where Birju suffers the accident that will define all their lives. It won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2015, the Folio Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Family Life took Sharma thirteen years to write. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He teaches at Rutgers University.