Amitav
Ghosh was
born on 11 July 1956
in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He
is the fifty fourth
Jnanpith award
winner. He is best known for historical fiction. He
studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of
The Circle of
Reason, The Shadow Lines,
In An
Antique Land,
Dancing in Cambodia,
The Calcutta
Chromosome,
The Glass Palace,
The Hungry Tide,
and The
Ibis Trilogy,
consisting of Sea of
Poppies, River
of Smoke and Flood
of Fire. His most
recent book, The
Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable,
a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016.
The Circle of Reason
was awarded
France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The
Shadow Lines
won two prestigious
Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda
Puraskar. The
Calcutta Chromosome
won the Arthur C.
Clarke award for 1997 and
The Glass Palace
won the
International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001.
In January 2005
The Hungry Tide
was awarded the
Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel,
Sea
of Poppies
(2008) was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the
Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.
Amitav Ghosh's work has been
translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the
juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have
appeared in The
New Yorker,
The New Republic
and
The New York Times.
They have been
anthologized under the titles
The Imam and the
Indian and
Incendiary
Circumstances.
The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,
a work of non-fiction, was published in 2016 and was given the
inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.
Amitav Ghosh holds two Lifetime
Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was
awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honors, by the
President of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with
Margaret Atwood of a Dan David prize, and 2011 he was awarded the
Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In 2018 the
Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on
Amitav Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the
award. In 2019 Foreign
Policy magazine named
him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding
decade.
Amitav Ghosh's most recent
novel, Gun
Island, is due to
be published in 2019.
Courtesy: https://www.amitavghosh.com
