Amitav Ghosh (born 1956 in Kolkatta, India) is a well-known Indian-Bengali author in the English language and a literary critic. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University. Deborah Baker, a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company and author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) is his wife. Lila and Nayan are their two children. He intends to return to India and purchased a property at Goa and also writes a trilogy for Penguin Books. He had his childhood in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India.
Education & Career of Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh studied at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; graduated from Delhi University; and the University of Oxford, where he obtained a Master of Philosophy and a Ph. D in social anthropology (1982).He did his field work in the fellaheen village of Lataifa in Egypt in 1980. He was also a journalist. This resulted in In an Antique Land (1993). He wrote his first novel The Circle of Reason in 1986, and his second, The Shadow Lines, in 1988. He also did field work in Cambodia, and wrote for a number of publications and lived in Delhi.
He was Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York in 1999, and visiting professor to the English department, Harvard University since 2005
Important Work of Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh’s major works include Sea of Poppies (2008) based on the colonial history of the East; The Hungry Tide (2004); The Imam and the Indian (2002); The Glass Palace (2000); Countdown (1999); Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998); The Calcutta Chromosome (1995); In an Antique Land (1992) The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990), and. The Circle of Reason (1986); He has also published numerous articles including ‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi’ (1995); ’The Fundamentalist Challenge’ (1995); ‘The Global Reservation: Notes Toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping’ (1994); ’Holiday in Cambodia (1993); ‘Petrofiction(1992); and ‘The Human Comedy in Cairo’ (1990).
Awards and Achievements for Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh won Padma Shri (2007), the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Shadow Lines and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome (1997).