Akhil Sharma – Visiting Writer

Sharma is a highly decorated short-story writer and novelist; he’s been awarded many of the most prestigious prizes and recognitions that a fiction writer can receive. His first novel, An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), hailed in New York Magazine by Jonathan Franzen as “A great novel” and described by Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books as “uncompromising,” with a “first chapter . . . [that] blasts off the locks and splinters the wood,” received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Sharma’s second novel, the spectacular Family Life (Norton, 2014), received both the International Dublin Literary Award and the Folio Prize. Scholar and writer Edmund White called it “a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture” and described it as “a near perfect novel.”

Sharma’s third and most recent book, the story collection A Life of Adventure and Delight (Norton, 2017), prompted writer Yiyun Li to describe Sharma as “truly the Chekhov of our time.” His stories have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. 

Indeed, Sharma is such an exacting and rigorous writer that, quite unusually, he recently published a revised and rewritten edition of An Obedient Father (McNally Editions, 2022) more than twenty years after it first appeared in print. The critic Wyatt Mason, reviewing the revised version in The New York Times Magazine, described this as “Something white-rhino rare in the history of literature”, adding, approvingly, “there is scarcely a paragraph that hasn’t been improved . . . ”

Born in Delhi, India, Sharma grew up in Edison, NJ. Before becoming a professor at Duke, where he now teaches, he was on the faculty at Rutgers. He is an engaging and surprising speaker and an excellent reader of his work

This event is sponsored by The Visiting Writers Series, with the Center for the Arts and the Intercultural Center.