Akhil Sharma Biography and latest books by Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma was born on July 22, 1971 in Delhi in India and moved base to the USA in 1979, where he lived in New Jersey. He took up Public Policy at Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton and Law at Harvard Law School. While at Princeton he also learnt from a succession of notable writers, including Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, John McPhee, and Tony Kushner.  After his graduation in 1992, he spent a year as a Wallace Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford.


Akhil Sharma now works as an investment banker and lives in New York. He has worked in India for United Press International and also for several grass roots development organisations.


His short stories have been published in the New Yorker and in Atlantic Monthly, and have also been included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Collections. Along with this he has also supported himself as a screenwriter for television and film.


Sharma is the author of one novel, An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Whiting Writers\' Award. In fact, his short story "Cosmopolitan" was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1998, and was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name.


An Obedient Father
Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Physical Education department in Delhi lives in one of the city\'s slums with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Ram is a man corroded by a guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, tries to protect himself and his family. Slowly his daughter reveals a heinous crime committed by him, something that he had hoped would be buried forever.