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New Delhi, Apr. 20 (ANI): The parents of Siddhartha Mukherjee, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize Winner for non-fiction, said on Wednesday that they were certain their son would do something for the country.

Mukherjee won the Pulitzer for his book ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer’.

‘The phone has been ringing non-stop for the last two days,’ said a visibly ecstatic Chandana Mukherjee, mother of Siddhartha Mukherjee.Speaking in an interview with Asian News International at her New Delhi residence, Mukherjee said they first received the news when the author rang them on Monday night.”Somehow, we became so emotional that we couldn’t talk to him properly, that was our first emotional (experience), but we knew that he will go quite far and he is such a serious person about his own work, he’ll do something for the nation. That we were very much certain about,” she said.Sibeswar Mukherjee, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s father, said he owed his son’s achievement to God.Chandana Mukherjee also said she would like the prize money to be used for a good cause, such as medical research.”About the prize money, well if he can do it, if he can spend the money for the good cause, we will be very much delighted. That is up to, only up to him, we are, we don’t have any talk about it, we don’t have any say about it, but yes, the prestige he has got, it is incredible. That is our prestige too,” she added.She also recounted the days when Siddhartha Mukherjee studied in St. Columbus School in New Delhi, and said he excelled in debating, poetry and other literary competitions. “He is a very good writer from very beginning. He used to write poems and he used to write stories and essays and all. So, this writing thing was inside him and very good command in English also,” said Chandana Mukherjee. Meanwhile, the CEO of publisher HarperCollins, India, P. M. Sukumar, said he was proud his organization was associated with the award-winning book. “We are really delighted that ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee has won the Pulitzer Prize. Though I must say that we are not surprised because even before the book was published in January this year, I had read it, and I was hugely impressed, and I knew that it was heading for some award,” he told ANI in NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh.Siddhartha Mukherjee is the fourth writer of Indian-origin to have won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize after Gobind Behari Lal, Jhumpa Lahiri and Geeta Anand.It took Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, over five years to complete the book and was the result of his experience with people struggling with cancer.The book has also been listed in the 10 best books of 2010 by the ‘New York Times’ and is among the Top 10 non-fiction books by ‘Time’ magazine. (ANI)