Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh
Born	(1956-07-11) 11 July 1956 (age 55)[1] Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	University of Delhi St Edmund Hall, Oxford
Genres	Historical fiction
Notable work(s)	The Glass Palace, Sea of Poppies,River of Smoke

Amitav Ghosh (Bengali: অমিতাভ ঘোষ, born July 11, 1956^[1]), is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.

Life

Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; India; and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a D. Phil. in social anthropology. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.^[2]

Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan. He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh subsequently returned to India and published his Ibis Trilogy, of which two volumes have been published to date, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke.

He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007.^[3] In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.^[4]

Work

Ghosh is the author of The Circle of Reason (his 1986 debut novel), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume of The Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the Opium War, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. Ghosh's latest work of fiction is River of Smoke (2011), the second volume of The Ibis trilogy.

The Circle of Reason won the Prix Médicis étranger, one of France's top literary awards.^[5] The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar.^[6][7] The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997.^[8] Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize.^[9] It was the co-winner of the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2009, as well as co-winner of the 2010 Dan David Prize.^[10] River of Smoke was shortlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize 2011.

Ghosh famously withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from consideration for The Commonwealth Prize where it had been awarded the Best Novel in Eurasian section, citing his objections to the term "Commonwealth" and the unfairness of the English-language requirement specified in the rules.^[11] Subsequently, he landed in controversy over his acceptance of the Israeli literary award, the $1 million dollar Dan David Prize.^[12]

Ghosh's most notable non-fiction writings are In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), and The Imam and the Indian (2002, a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature).

Bibliography

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Amitav Ghosh

• Official website
• Excerpt from River of Smoke in Guernica Magazine
• Sea of Poppies at Farrar, Straus and Giroux site
• Amitav Ghosh in Emory University Site
• Interview with Amitav Ghosh on CNN-IBN/ibnlive.com on his book Sea of Poppies
• Amitav Ghosh's Blog on Indipepal

References