Amitav Ghosh, famous Indian English writer, was born in Calcutta in 1956. His father was a lieutenant-colonel in the army as a result he has to travel to different parts of the world. Thus Amitav Ghosh was raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India and United Kingdom. He received his earlier education at the Doon School, Dehradun, and later went to university for his higher studies. He completed his graduation from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, in History. After this he did his Masters in Sociology from Delhi University. After completing his Masters of Arts he earned diploma in Arabic from Institut Bourguiba Des Langues Vivantes, Tunis, Tunisia. Then he went to Oxford University where he did diploma in Social Anthropology and earned his doctorate in the same subject in 1982.
He is a versatile writer and his novels have won many literary awards. His first novel, ‘The Circle of Reasons’ won the Prix Medicis Etrangere, one of the top literary awards of France. His second novel, ‘Shadow Lines’ won the famous Sahitya Akademi award of 1990, India’s most prestigious literary prize. He received another award, the Ananda Puraskar, Calcutta for the same book. His book ‘Calcutta Chromosome’ received Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997. His novel ‘Glass Palace’ won the grand prize for fiction at the Frankfurt International e-book award in 2001. He achieved another milestone when he won the 1999 Pushcart Prize, a leading literary award, for one of his essays that was published in the Kenyon Review. His book ‘In An Antique Land’ was given the New York Times Notable Book of 1993 Award. Hungry tide is his recent book.
Apart from fiction, Amitav Ghosh is also involved with writing non-fiction. His major non-fictions include ‘Countdown’, a book on India’s nuclear policy, the ‘Imam and the Indians’, a collection of essays on various topics such as history of the novel, Egyptian culture and literature, and ‘Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma’. Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India. Currently he is living in New york with his wife, Deborah Baker, who is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding and is working as a senior editor at Little Brown and Co. Ghosh joined the faculty of the Queens College in the City University of New York as a distinguished professor in comparative literature. Since 1995 he has been the visiting professor to the English Department of Harvard University.
