Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father

Literature has taught me you are going to regret being cruel – you are not going to regret being kind.

Born in India and raised in the US, Akhil Sharma is the author of An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award. His short story, Cosmopolitan, was anthologised in The Best American Short Stories 1998, and was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name. Gary Shteyngart, Kiran Desai, and Mohsin Hamid are among his many champions and Family Life, his new novel, is generating a phenomenal buzz. The New Yorker has twice run excerpts. The story of how a family copes with their gifted son’s calamitous accident,Family Life (Faber, £14.99) is, according to the Observer, “a delicate and often moving work of palliative poetics, based on a calamity that befell his own brother”.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brought-to-book-akhil-sharma-on-his-debt-to-hemingway-and-robinson-crusoe-1.1789900