The Visiting Artists Program resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in the classroom in preparation for the event, research, or post-lecture discussion.
Amitav Ghosh Reading and Talk: Tuesday, October 5, 6:30–7:45 p.m. CT
Click here to join via Zoom, Passcode: SAICVAP
This event will be live captioned by CART.
Join us live for a virtual book reading and talk by writer Amitav Ghosh followed by an audience Q&A.
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; The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire; and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. His most recent novels are Gun Island, which was released in September 2019, and Jungle Nama, released in February 2021. Ghosh’s essays have appeared in the New Yorker, The New Republic, and the New York Times. They have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian (Penguin Random House India) and Incendiary Circumstances (Houghton Mifflin, United States).
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 in 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 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award in 2008. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.
Ghosh's work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. He holds two lifetime achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honors, by the president of India. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of the Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montréal. In 2018, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on 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.
Portrait credit: Amitav Ghosh. Photo: Ivo van der Bent
Writer’s Website
Gallery Agency / Representation
Amitav Ghosh's new book 'The Nutmeg's Curse' to release in October
Times of India | June 16, 2021
Interview: Amitav Ghosh, author, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban
Chintan Girish Modi | Hindustan Times | May 28, 2021
HarperCollins India is proud to announce the acquisition and forthcoming publication of The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times by Amitav Ghosh
PR Newswire | April 23, 2021
Sunday Lounge | Indians are inescapably multilingual: Amitav Ghosh
Somak Ghoshal | Mint Lounge | January 10, 2021
Amitav Ghosh on Literature and Climate Coincidence
Stephanie Bernhard | Orion Magazine| November 27, 2019
Amitav Ghosh: ‘We Are Living in a Reality That Is Fundamentally Uncanny’
David Wallace-Wells | New York Magazine | September 20, 2019
When Climate Change Is Stranger Than Fiction*
Alisha Haridasani Gupta | The New York Times | September 7, 2019
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Amitav Ghosh conferred Jnanpith Award
Pallavi Keswani | The Hindu | June 13, 2019
Amitav Ghosh: where is the fiction about climate change?
Amitav Ghosh | The Guardian | October 28, 2016
Book Review: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
Padmaparna Ghosh | Live Mint | July 12, 2016
Amitav Ghosh: 'The World Of Fact Is Outrunning The World Of Fiction'
All Things Considered [Podcast] | NPR | September 16, 2019 | Please note this podcast does provide transcripts
Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban by 
Gun Island by 
The Great Derangement by 
Flood of Fire by 
River of Smoke by 
Sea of Poppies by 
The Hungry Tide by 
The Shadow Lines by 
Incendiary Circumstances by 
The Calcutta Chromosome by 
South Asian Partition Fiction in English by 
Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction by 
Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture by Literature and Sustainability: Exploratory Essays by 
Literature As Cultural Ecology by Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.
SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977-98).