Why it pays to persevere

Writing can be a tough business, challenging and often frustrating, but is it is always worth persevering if you have a story to tell.
Take the Indian-American writer Akhil Sharma, who has just been named winner of the second Folio prize for fiction for a novel which took him 13  years to complete.
Family Life charts an emigrant family’s search for the American dream, and after winning the  £40,000 prize, the author was quoted as saying that the writing  process was  often “like chewing stones, with around nine wasted years when it did not go well. I’m glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn’t been the guy who wrote it.”
But write it he did. Family Life, his second novel, is an autobiographical work which tells the story of a young boy and his family who emigrate from Delhi to New York in search of a better life.
William Fiennes, who chaired the judges, praised the novel, currently a bestseller in the US, saying: ”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.”
The prize, sponsored by the Folio Society, was created last year with the aim of celebrating the year’s best English-language fiction, regardless of form, genre and geography.

John Dean