🇮🇳 Amitav Ghosh

He was born in 1956 in Calcutta to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghose, an officer in the British Indian Army who served at Imphal during the Second World War, and Anjali Ghose. Because of his father's postings and later diplomatic work, he grew up across East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Iran and India — an itinerant childhood that would seep into nearly every book he wrote. He studied at the Doon School, then St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and the Delhi School of Economics. He completed a DPhil in social anthropology at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1982, with fieldwork in a small village in Egypt.

His doctoral fieldwork in Egypt produced his first non-fiction book, In an Antique Land (1992), a hybrid memoir-history that follows a twelfth-century Jewish merchant and his Indian slave through letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza. It remains one of the most original Indian works of non-fiction in English and is still on graduate reading lists at Yale, JNU and SOAS.

His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), won the Prix Médicis étranger in France. The Shadow Lines (1988) — about the 1964 Calcutta riots and a young narrator's transcontinental memory — won the Sahitya Akademi Award and is now taught in undergraduate literature programmes across India. Its central image, of a young Indian boy mapping the world from his Calcutta bedroom and discovering that the maps lie, has become one of the most quoted passages in modern Indian English fiction.

The Hungry Tide (2004), set in the Sundarbans among researchers, fishermen and Bengal tigers, established him as the most ecologically literate of Indian novelists in English. The Ibis trilogy — Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015) — reconstructed the Indian-Ocean opium trade and the lead-up to the First Opium War across more than fifteen hundred pages, in a polyphonic English laced with Bhojpuri, Cantonese, Lascar dialect and ship's-cabin pidgin. Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Booker.

His non-fiction has tracked, with growing urgency, the climate crisis. The Great Derangement (2016) argues that mainstream literary fiction has failed to engage with climate change because of the assumptions built into the realist novel — its preference for the everyday, the human-scaled, the probable. The Nutmeg's Curse (2021) extends the argument backward through colonial history, treating the seventeenth-century genocide of Banda Islanders by the Dutch East India Company as an early act of climate violence.

In 2018 he became the first Indian writer in English to receive the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, which had until then been reserved for writers working in Indian languages. He has held the Padma Shri since 2007. He divides his year between Brooklyn, Goa and Kolkata, and writes most mornings by 5 a.m. He is married to the American writer Deborah Baker, whose own biography of the poet Laura Riding earned her a Pulitzer finalist nomination.

He has consistently refused, however, to be drawn into Twitter quarrels or political endorsements. His public statements are made in essays and lectures, often delivered at climate conferences and university chairs, and read like extended footnotes from his books. He is, in a culture of constant performance, an unfashionably slow writer. He has not regretted it. Neither, increasingly, has the climate-fiction canon that now begins, more or less, with him.