Amitav Ghosh

Amtiav Ghosh Headshot
Photo Credit: Mathieu Genon

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, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of FireThe Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. Gun Island, was released in September 2019. Ghosh’s first-ever book in verse, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, was published February 2021. His latest books, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, was released in October, 2021 and Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories was released in February, 2024.

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 for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York TimesThey have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian (Penguin Random House India) and Incendiary Circumstances (Houghton Mifflin, USA). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.


Excerpt from The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

Taking a nutmeg out of its fruit is like unearthing a tiny planet. Like a planet, the nutmeg is encased within a series of expanding spheres. There is, first of all, the fruit’s matte-brown skin, a kind of exosphere. Then there is the pale, perfumed flesh, growing denser toward the core, like a planet’s outer atmosphere. And when all the flesh has been stripped away, you have in your hand a ball wrapped in what could be a stratosphere of fiery, crimson clouds: it is this fragrant outer sleeve that is known as mace. Stripping off the mace reveals yet another casing, a glossy, ridged, chocolate- colored carapace, which holds the nut inside like a protective tropo sphere. Only when this shell is cracked open do you have the nut in your palm, its surface clouded by matte-brown continents floating on patches of ivory.

And should you then break the nut open, you will see inside something akin to a geological structure—except that it is composed of the unique mixture of substances that produces the aroma, and the psychotropic effects, that are the nut’s very own superpowers.

Like a planet, a nutmeg too can never be seen in its entirety at one time. As with the moon, or any spherical (or quasi- spherical) object, a nutmeg has two hemispheres; when one is in the light, the other must be in darkness—for one to be seen by the human eye, the other must be hidden.

Continue reading an excerpt from The Nutmeg’s Curse in Financial Express.


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