Our Correspondent / NEW DELHI
WELL known English writer Amitav Ghosh has been honoured with this year’s prestigious Jnanpith Award. The decision was taken in a meeting of Jnanpith Selection Board chaired by eminent novelist, scholar and Jnanpith laureate Pratibha Ray.
In a statement, Bharatiya Jnanpith said Amitav Ghosh is a path-breaking novelist. In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways.
Ghosh, one of the most prominent contemporary Indian writers, is known for a series of novels such as “Shadow Lines”, “The Glass Palace”, “The Hungry Tide”, and Ibis Trilogy “Sea of Poppies”, “River of Smoke”, and “Flood of Fire” chronicling the Opium trade between India and China run by the East India Company. Ghosh is also recipient of the Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award.
Born in 1956 in Kolkata, West Bengal, Amitav Ghosh is a path- breaking novelist. In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways. His fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist. His major thematic concerns include migration and interconnections across places, cultures and races, and human distress and suffering caused by historical turbulences, especially at the level of girmitiyas, coolies and lascars.
Amitav Ghosh has explored Indian protagonists ranging across a wide international field, including Bangladesh, England, Egypt and Burma/Myanmar in both his fictional and discursive writings. Some of his celebrated creations include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and the Ibis trilogy that includes Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire.
He is the recipient of many coveted awards that include Sahitya Akademi Award, Ananda Puraskar, Crossword Book Prize, Prix Médicis Award from France and was short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
I am truly honored and humbled… https://t.co/q9k35TKEwr
— Amitav Ghosh (@GhoshAmitav) December 14, 2018