Biography
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. After graduating from the University of Delhi, he went to Oxford to study Social Anthropology and received a D.Phil. in 1982. In 1980, he went to Egypt to do fieldwork among the rural fellaheen, which contributed to his 1993 non-fiction work, In an Antique Land. Ghosh published his first novel, The Circle of Reason, in 1986, followed by The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000), Incendiary Circumstances (2006) and The Hungry Tide (2004). He has reported for Granta and the New Yorker and his writing has won many literary awards including the Prix Medici Etranger, one of France's top literary awards; the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Prize, two of India's most prestigious literary prizes; the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Pushcart Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is married to the American writer Deborah Baker and has two children; he divides his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn.