Author: Amitav Ghosh
Profile: Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He is well known for his work in English fiction. He was born in Calcutta, India and spent his growing up years in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. He completed his education at the Delhi School of Economics and University of Oxford.
His books are mainly influenced by this and are set around the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The topmost literary award, the Prix Medicis Etranger award was given to his book, The Circle of Reason. In the year 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri.
The historian Ram Guha and well known author Vikram Seth have been his contemporaries at The Doon School in Dehradun. He contributed poetry and fiction on a regular basis to the School Weekly when he was at school. He worked for the Indian Express, New Delhi during his early career. He lives with author Deborah Baker, his wife, in New York.
Writing style: Amitav Ghosh’s genre is historical fiction. His writing deals in the epic themes of memory and history, diaspora and travel, loss and love, communal violence and political struggle, while he crosses the generic boundaries all the time between art work and anthropology.
Published Texts:
Novels
1986 – The Circle of Reason
1988 – The Shadow Lines
1995 – The Calcutta Chromosome
2000 – The Glass Palace
2004 – The Hungry Tide
2008 – Sea of Poppies
2011 – River of Smoke
2015 – Flood of Fire
2019 – Gun Island
Non-Fiction
1992 – In an Antique Land
1998 – Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (Essays)
1999 – Countdown
2002 – The Imam and the Indian (Essays)
2006 – Incendiary Circumstances (Essays)
2016 – The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Awards and Acknowledgements:
Jnanpith Award
2007 Padma Shri
1997 – Arthur C. Clarke Award
Prix Medicis etranger
Ananda Puraskar
Sahitya Akademi Award
Dan David Prize
2016 – Lifetime Achievement Award at Tata Literature Live – (The Mumbai LitFest)