‘“POSTCOLONIAL” DESCRIBES YOU AS A NEGATIVE’

Abstract

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Amitav Ghosh studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria, and did fieldwork in Egypt and Cambodia. He worked for a newspaper in New Delhi, and currently lives in New York where he teaches at Columbia University. He has published five novels so far: The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). The Sahitya Akademi Award 1989 (for The Shadow Lines), the Arthur C. Clarke Award 1997 (for The Calcutta Chromosome), the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International eBook Awards in 2001 (for The Glass Palace) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award 2004 (for The Hungry Tide) are among the prominent prizes he has won. In 2001, he withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from consideration for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, questioning both the relevance of ‘commonwealth literature’ as a category and the policy of excluding non-English language writing from the purview of the Prize. (Read his letter to the Commonwealth Foundation and the Foundation's response at <http://iaclals.8m.com/nl/01jul/01jul08.htm>)