Akhil Sharma
Akhil Sharma
Akhil Sharmais an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth22 July 1971
CountryIndia
writing years mind
Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.
hurt thinking long
Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
real book fiction
Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.
baby memories past
The little babies are missing their families from their past lives. The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies. The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they'll forget.
done sometimes wonder
When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?
growing-up want be-kind
It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.
decided feared good hoped merits novel perspective publishing taken various written
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
life people
I am shamelessly biased about the people in my life, and it makes sense to me that other people are the same.
love people profoundly unaware
We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.
attempt blueprint family gruesome horrible life physically
'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.
almost family gray life paint paper
When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.
begun buy needed registered steal tiny torment whenever
During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.
I don't really revise. I tend to rewrite.
country leave
I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.