Amitav Ghosh

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This page is about the writer, for the banker see Amitav Ghosh (banker)

Amitav Ghosh (born 1956 in Calcutta), is an Indian author known for his work in the English language.

He was educated at The Doon School, where he was a younger contemporary of Vikram Seth, St. Stephen's College, Delhi, Delhi University and Oxford University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology.

Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Co., and his children Lila and Nayan. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College in the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature.

His latest work of fiction, The Hungry Tide was published in April, 2004. His other novels are The Shadow Lines (1990), In An Antique Land (1994), The Circle of Reason (1986), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), and The Glass Palace (2000). The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's most prestigious literary prize. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997.

His fiction is characterised by strong themes that overlap in part with postcolonialism, but his work is much less formulaic, and not easy to "label". His topics are much more unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious, heavier themes.

Ghosh also has three works of non-fiction to his credit. They are Countdown (on India's nuclear policy) The Imam and the Indian (a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture and literature - 2002) and Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998).