We are thrilled to hear that Akhil Sharma has been awarded the prestigious Folio Prize, designed to honor the year’s best English-language fiction and including a £40,000 check.
The chair of the judges, William Fiennes, praised Family Life as “lucid, compassionate, quietly funny,” adding, “Family Life is a masterful novel of distilled complexity: about catastrophe and survival; attachment and independence; the tension between selfishness and responsibility. We loved its deceptive simplicity and rare warmth ... This is a work of art that expands with each re-reading and a novel that will endure.”
Andrew Kidd, a co-founder of the prize, also had great things to say: “In this second year of the prize our five judges have again lived up to every expectation, selecting from a glorious shortlist a heartbreaking and funny novel whose astonishing power is achieved in constantly surprising ways.”
