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-Bengali 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. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005.

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, given to an author from each scheduled language in the Indian Constitution every year. He won it in the English language category. 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). He was awarded Padma Sri by the Government of India in 2007. Recently he has purchased a property in Goa and immigrating back to India. His proposed work on a trilogy has been awarded to Penguin,India.