Skip to main content

Amitav Ghosh

Biography

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy, composed of SEA OF POPPIES (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), RIVER OF SMOKE and FLOOD OF FIRE. His other novels include THE CIRCLE OF REASON, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and THE GLASS PALACE. He is the author of many works of nonfiction, including THE GREAT DERANGEMENT: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and THE NUTMEG'S CURSE: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. He has received two lifetime achievement awards and five honorary doctorates. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Amitav Ghosh

Books by Amitav Ghosh

by Amitav Ghosh - History, Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, the Ibis Trilogy, 10 years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the 19th-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. SMOKE AND ASHES is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as the world at large.

by Amitav Ghosh - Fiction

A dealer of rare books, Deen Datta is used to a quiet life spent indoors. But as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him.

by Amitav Ghosh - Fiction, Historical Fiction

It is 1839, and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong. FLOOD OF FIRE is the final novel in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy.

by Amitav Ghosh

In Amitav Ghosh's SEA OF POPPIES, the Ibis began its treacherous journey across the Indian Ocean, bound for the cane fields of Mauritius with a cargo of indentured servants. Now, in RIVER OF SMOKE, the former slave ship flounders in the Bay of Bengal, caught in the midst of a deadly cyclone.