Amitav Ghosh Books In Order

Publication Order of Ibis Trilogy Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born writer famous for contemporary literature that uses complex narrative strategies to explore the personal and national identity of people from India and South Asia origins. Ghosh was born on 11th July 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family in Calcutta. His father, Shailendra Chandra Ghosh was a retired officer in the pre-independence Indian army who worked as a diplomat during Ghosh’s early life. As a result of his father’s job, Ghosh traveled a lot during his childhood and mingled with different cultures of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Iran besides that from his own country India.

Ghosh went to the University of Delhi for his higher education graduating with Bachelor of Arts and Masters Degree in 1976 and 1978 respectively. During that time, he was also working as a reporter and editor at Indian Express newspaper. He then moved to England and enrolled for a Ph.D. Degree in social anthropology in the University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 and embarked on a teaching career at various universities including the University of Delhi, Columbia University in New York City, the American University in Cairo, Queens College of the City University of New York and Harvard University among other institutions.

Ghosh is married to Deborah Baker who is also a well-known author of the Life of Laura Riding. They are blessed with two children Lila and Nayan. Amitav Ghosh is a fellow at the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. Ghosh career as a writer began in 1986 when he released his debut novel the Circle of Reason. He then went on to release other captivating fiction and nonfiction novels that have been honored with various awards. The Ghosh work revolves around the epic themes of history and memory, travel and diaspora, love and loss, and political struggle and communal violence while at the same time crossing the generic aspects of art and anthropology.

The writings narratives of Ghosh both fictional and nonfictional tend to be transnational moving across countries, oceans, and continents. His literature is also convincingly learned and thoroughly researched showing the scale of scholarship that sits behind every piece of his work. Furthermore, his work is consistently focused. It never loses the charming human dimension of things and always returns to Calcutta. Moreover, the referents and registers of Bengali and South Asian culture consistently and thickly accent the characters global ambition on all of his novels.

Amitav Ghosh Novels and Literature Career

His first release, the Circle of Reason centers on an eight-year-old Bengali boy with a huge head accused of terrorism and his journey to Africa. The novel is considered as a postmodern and postcolonial literature due to the way it highlights the colonial factors as well as the intertextual nature of the novel. The novel perfectly blends the elements of picaresque and fable fiction by bringing out the postcolonial element distinctively in the marginalization of Europe and the postcolonial element uniquely in its thick intertextuality and nonlinear structure. The Circle of Reason together with the Shadow Lines were both written in English and gave Ghosh world recognition.

Amitav Ghosh released the Shadow of Lines in 1988. The novel is written in a captivating, condensed prose that almost sounds like poetry. The novel is more about geography and chronology experimentations. It brings out excitement and creativity while moving between Calcutta and London dealing with the past inventions and the arbitrariness of Second World War and present partition. The Shadow Line highlights the threshold between the West and East while also bringing out the ghostly haunting of the past. Furthermore, besides the historical fiction, the Amitav Ghosh has also delved into science fiction genre with the Calcutta Chromosome published in 1995. The novel is a medical mystery thriller that is set in future around random people brought together by common events. The novel brings out three searches that include the trace of a disappeared L. Murugan, missing links in Malaria research and a suppressed journalist.

In addition to the fiction novels, Amitav Ghosh has also written non-fiction literature including the famous Imam and the Indian and in an Antique Land. In an Antique Land was released in 1992 and borrows heavily from the Ghosh anthropology training while defying the generic details. The novel brings out the delicate and deeply moving evocation of the twelfth century Egypt. The Imam and the Indian novel was released in 2002 and features a large collection of different themed essays that include Egyptian culture, literature, history of the novel and fundamentalism.

Awards and Recognitions

Amitav Ghosh has won several accolades for his amazing fictitious and non-fictitious literature. In 1990, Ghosh won three accolades that include the France Prix Medicis award with the Circle of Reason, and the Sahitya Akademi Award and Ananda Puraskar with the Shadow Lines. In 1997, the Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Award. In 2001, Ghosh was back in the limelight when his literature, the Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award in Frankfurt. The Hungry Tide also won a major Indian award, the Crossword Book Prize in 2005.

Another novel that brought Amitav Ghosh awards and recognition is the Sea of Poppies, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Although it did not win the Man Booker Award, it won the Indian Plaza Golden Quill Award and the Crossword Book Prize in the same year. In 2011, Ghosh also hit the limelight when his literature the River of Smoke was shortlisted for Asian Literary Prize. In 2007, Ghosh was recognized by the Government of India and bestowed the Padma Shri civilian honor.

In addition to wide honors, Amitav Ghosh has also courted controversy. He withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from Commonwealth Writers’ Prize despite already winning the award protesting the term commonwealth and the English-language requirement. He was also criticized for his acceptance of the $1 million Dan David Prize. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has also served on the jury of the Venice Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival. His essays have also been published on various platforms including the New York Times, the New Republic and the New Yorker.