Why Is He Famous?
India born Amitav Ghosh is a world renowned novelist and author. In his
writing, Amitav Ghosh demonstrates the mixture and interstitial nature
of cultures, as expressed through language. Like many subaltern authors,
Amitav Ghosh endeavors to recuperate the silenced voices of those not
represented in the historical record. Amitav Ghosh has held academic
positions at a number of universities, including the Delhi University
and the Columbia University. At present Ghosh is a distinguished
professor at the Queens College, New York University.
Amitav Ghosh has received numerous awards for his works. Some of these
awards are Prix Medicis Etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986), the
Sahitya Akademi Award for The Shadow Lines (1988), the Arthur C. Clarke
Prize for science fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), the
Pushcart Prize for his essay, "The March of the Novel through
History: My Father's Bookcase" and the Grand Prize for Fiction at
the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards for The Glass Palace
Amitav's latest work of fiction, The Hungry Tide was published in April
2004. Other prominent works of Amitav are - The Shadow Lines (1990), In
An Antique Land (1994), The Circle of Reason (1986), The Calcutta
Chromosome (1995), and The Glass Palace (2000). Ghosh also has written
three works of non-fiction. They are Countdown (on India's nuclear
policy) The Imam and the Indian (a collection of essays on different
themes like fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture and
literature) and Dancing in Cambodia.
Background
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta. His father was in the Indian army. It
was mainly because of this reason that Amitav Ghosh got the chance to
visit a number of countries including Sri Lanka, Iran and Bangladesh.
Amitav Ghosh did schooling from the Doon school, Dehra Dun. He completed
his graduation from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. After
leaving St. Stephen's with a B.A. in History in 1976, he obtained an
M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi University in 1978. He went to St.
Edmund Hall, Oxford pursue postgraduate work and in 1979 obtained a
diploma in social anthropology. He also spent some time at Tunis where
he learnt Arabic. Amitav Ghosh was awarded his Oxford D. Phil. in Social
Anthropology for his thesis on "Kinship in Relation to the Economic
and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community" in 1981.
Amitav Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, the author
of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at
Little Brown and Co., and his children Leela and Nayan.
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