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Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the first two volumes of The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke.
The Circle of Reason was awarded France's Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997, and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.
Ghosh's work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Ghosh's essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016 and was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College, and Harvard. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal. In 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor, was conferred on Amitav Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
Amitav Ghosh's website
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In two separate interviews, Amitav Ghosh discusses Sea of Poppies and The Glass Palace.
Amitav Ghosh discusses Sea of Poppies
How long did it take you to write Sea of
Poppies?
About four years.
How much research did you have to undertake
for details such as nautical references and the language used?
I love nineteenth-century nautical fiction so many of
the details were just buried in my head. As for the rest, it was so
deeply pleasurable, I don't know whether I should even call it
research. I traveled to Mauritius, to look at the National Archives and
some other libraries; I spent some time in Greenwich, England, looking
at the magnificent collection of the National Maritime Museum. But the
best part of all was learning to sail—that was an experience that
surpassed everything I had imagined.
How much of a challenge was it to write the
language used by the lascars?
A ship manned by lascars must have been a kind of
floating babel. Sailors from all around the Indian Ocean went by the
name 'lascar'—East Africans, South Asians, Filipinos, Chinese, Malays.
When you look at one of those old crew lists, you can't help wondering
...
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