Sathnam Sanghera, a Times columnist, has won the Mind Awards Book of the Year for The Boy with the Topknot, a memoir of coming of age in 1980s Britain. It tells 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.”