Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and grew up in several parts of South Asia, including India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi before completing a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. Anthropological fieldwork, journalism and extensive travel shaped his interest in migration, language and the movement of people and commodities across borders. Rather than treating national histories in isolation, his writing frequently follows routes that connect the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China and Europe.

Ghosh’s novels include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace and the Ibis Trilogy, beginning with Sea of Poppies. The trilogy places sailors, convicts, merchants, migrants and colonial officials within the opium economy and the conflicts that led to the First Opium War. His historical fiction combines archival research with multilingual dialogue and a strong awareness of how empire altered labour, trade and identity. Later nonfiction and fiction have also examined climate change, ecology and the political consequences of environmental disruption. Ghosh is therefore an important author for readers interested in colonial India, the British Empire, maritime history, indenture, migration and the commercial networks that made the nineteenth-century world increasingly interconnected.