The 2016 Dublin International Literary Award Winner is Akhil Sharma
The American Indian author won the most valuable award for a single novel with his auto-biographical novel about a family who moves from Delhi to New York and who then have to deal with the tragedy of a family member having a serious accident, being left brain damaged and in need of 24 hour care.
Family Life took Sharma 13 years to complete and he said the act felt like “a nightmare – like chewing stones, chewing gravel” and his reaction to discovering he had won was typically subdued. “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,”
Nominated for the award by the India International Centre library in New Delhi and by Jacksonville public library in the US, Family Life has received incredible critical acclaim from the judges with Carlo Gébler, saying that
“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.”
It also appears that the rather modest victor has already got plans for some of his €100,000 prize money saying “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,” however lest anyone think him frivolous, he also hopes to set up a scholarship in his brother’s name “..to help young women go to school. I would have done that anyway, without this prize, but it makes it easier.”
A worthy winner indeed.
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Books are nominated for the Award by invited public libraries in cities throughout the world – making the Award unique in its coverage of international fiction. Titles are nominated on the basis of ‘high literary merit’ as determined by the nominating library.