London: Indian-origin Sathnam Sanghera, a columnist for The Times, has won the Mind Awards Book of the Year for his book, 'The Boy with the Topknot', a memoir of coming of age in 1980s Britain.
The book details how, while balancing his life with the expectations of his traditionalist Punjabi parents, his world changed after a discovery about his family's mental health.
Blake Morrison, one of the judging panel for the award, which celebrates books that raise awareness of issues surrounding mental illness, praised the book for its frankness.
"The judges admired Sanghera's courage. When writers from ethnic minorities write honestly about the world they grew up in, they're sometimes accused of betrayal and disloyalty, as Philip Roth and Monica Ali have found. But Sanghera's is a loyal and loving book, which couldn't have been written without the support of his family. Uncovering the secrets in his family requires him, at the end, to disclose some awkward truths about himself."
Other nominees for the award were Stephanie Merritt's The Devil Within: A Memoir of Depression and Joanna Moncrieff's The Myth of the Chemical Cure, which argues that psychiatric drugs are a dangerous fraud.