Amitav Ghosh

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 Doonschool, 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 adiploma 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.