G

AMITAV GHOSH (B. 1956) Born in Calcutta, Amitav Ghosh was educated at Delhi University, India, and achieved a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford University, UK. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, and was followed by The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Ghosh’s novels, both individually and as a body of work, range across South and East Asia – Bengal, Burma, India and elsewhere – and are often concerned with the endangered peoples, cultures and histories of the region who have suffered under European colonialism and its contemporary neocolonial antecedents. Yet his work is restlessly inventive and delightfully difficult to summarize collectively (The Calcutta Chromosome won the 1996 Arthur C. Clark award for Science Fiction). Ghosh is also a significant non-fictional writer. His book In An Antique Land (1992) draws on his doctoral studies as a social anthropologist and his experiences while living among local peoples in the Nile Delta in Egypt, while Countdown (1999) engages with the nuclear arms policies of India and Pakistan. In 2001 Ghosh controversially withdrew The Glass Palace from being considered as overall winner by the judges of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (it had already been declared winner of the Eurasian section of the prize) in protest against the legitimacy of the term ‘Commonwealth Literature’. He currently lives in Brooklyn in the USA.