Richest literary award with Euros 100,000.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Akhil Sharma’s heart-rending autobiographical novel ‘Family Life’, based on his own life emigrating with family when he was eight years old from India to America in the late 1970s and how the family copes with a devastating tragedy, has won the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award – the richest literary award which comes with Euros 100,000.
Accepting the prize, Sharma said he felt “abashed”, reported the BBC.
Previously known as the Impac Award, the winner is chosen from a shortlist of 10, compiled from nominations made by public libraries in 118 cities.
‘Family Life’ was put forward by the India International Centre library in New Delhi and by Jacksonville public library in the US. It was one of 160 titles up for the prize, with nominations spanning 43 countries.
The Jacksonville library called the novel “beautifully hypnotic”, with Sharma’s “plain style, its gaps and fissures and mighty sense of lack … both proof of the inability of words to render grief and a demonstration that they can do exactly that”.
Sharma, a former banker and now an assistant professor of English at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, has previously won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction for his novel ‘An Obedient Father’ and the New York Times’ Notable Book of the Year. ‘Family Life’ also won the Folio prize last year.
“To be acknowledged by people I respect is a strange thing. I can’t say I fooled them. I feel abashed by this honor,” he told the BBC.
Sharma is the third American author to win the prize in its 21-year history.
Family Life was chosen ahead of books by Man Booker prize winner Marlon James, Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson and debut novelists Mary Costello and Scholastique Mukasonga.
The prize’s longlist of 160 works included works by JK Rowling’s pseudonym Robert Galbraith, journalist Caitlin Moran, Ian McEwan and past Impac winners Colm Toibin and Per Petterson.
Judges, who included the novelists Ian Sansom, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Carlo Gébler, said of ‘Family Life’, “closing the book, having known this mix of light and dark, you are left with the sense that while reading, you were actually at the core of human experience and what it is to be alive. This is the highest form of achievement in literature. Few manage it. This novel does. Triumphantly. Luminously. Movingly.”
The Guardian reported that Sharma has made some plans for the money he has received: buy some new shoes.
Sharma describes the almost 13 years it took him to write Family Life as “a nightmare – like chewing stones, chewing gravel”, said it had taken a few days for his win to sink in.
“I’m much more aware of pain than I am receptive to joy. When 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. Two or three days after that, I began to feel happy,” he said, speaking from Dublin.
“I don’t believe that a prize means it’s the best book. All a prize means is that it is the book which has won a prize, that it’s the one judges agreed on. But it’s a great honor – it’s a prize I’ve known about for decades, and I admire the books which have won.”
These include novels by Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and Herta Müller, as well as British authors Jim Crace and Jon McGregor.
Sharma’s immediate intentions for the €100,000 check he received on Thursday morning include grand and ordinary ambitions.
“I used to weigh an enormous amount. When I was writing the novel, I began to feel I had no control over my life. The one thing I had control over was my body, and I began exercising like a fiend, running 17 miles every day. I lost so much weight that even my shoe size changed, so I will be buying some shoes,” he told the Guardian. “And I’d like to start a scholarship in India in my brother’s name, to help young women go to school. I would have done that anyway, without this prize, but it makes it easier.”
Sharma added: “I don’t know whether it is a good book, but people are treating it like a good book, and I presume people are not stupid. So it must have merit to it. It would make me queasy. My wife has not read the book either – she is scared of reading it and seeing how much pain I was in as a child.” He said he had not reread the book since he finished it.
Sharma revealed to the Guardian that he is now working on a book of short stories, which he started after he finished writing ‘Family Life.
“I kept telling myself: ‘Akhil, it doesn’t have to be a good story, it just has to be like a story,’ and to some extent that was freeing, engaging with fiction as purely a form. I wrote that story and I was astonished as I wrote it to realize how much I had learned through writing a novel,” he said.
Read Sujeet Rajan’s review of ‘Family Life’: http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2014/04/30/akhil-sharmas-ode-tragedy-family-life/