Business author Mihir Sharma's Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy long-listed for the FT - McKinsey award

Penguin Random House said this week that Mihir Sharma's gripping first book, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy, has been long-listed for the Financial Times and Mc Kinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Sharma, is the only Indian author on the list of 15, has been nominated alongside other Penguin Random House titles like Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance, Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt, Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper, Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner and Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

The shortlist will be announced on 22nd September. 

In Restart, Sharma shows what can and must change in India's policies, its administration and even its attitudes.

"The answers he provides are not obvious. Nor are they all comforting or conventional. Yet they could, in less time than you can imagine, unleash the creativity of a billion hopeful Indians," said Penguin Random House in a statement.

Sharma was born in Delhi and grew up in Chandigarh, Mumbai, Jamshedpur and in Kolkata. He was trained as an economist and a political scientist before dropping ignobly out of academia. Like many others unable to concentrate on any one thing long enough to write a dissertation, he drifted from one thing to another till he found the closest thing to paid unemployment in a capitalist society - journalism. He writes and edits opinion for the Business Standard in New Delhi.