Amitav Ghosh – Year of election 2009

Amitav Ghosh’s most recent book, published last year and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is Sea Poppies, a novel of the opium wars that James Buchan compared to Walter Scott – with dollops of Hobson-Jobson. Ghosh’s first, The Circle of Reason (1986), was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger, his second, The Shadow Lines, won two important Indian prizes, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar, and the third, The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His books have been translated into 19 languages and in 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours.

Giving an interview on the publication in 2001 of The Glass Palace, which won a Frankfurt eBook Award at the Frankfurt book fair, Amitav Ghosh was asked how his background as an historian, journalist and anthropologist informed his work. He said: “For me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life – history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs, religion, family, love, sexuality. As I see it the novel is a meta-form that transcends the boundaries that circumscribe other kinds of writing, rendering meaningless the usual workaday distinctions between historian, journalist, anthropologist etc.”