Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh trained as a social anthropologist, earning a doctorate at Oxford and doing fieldwork in an Egyptian village before turning that discipline's attention to borders, trade routes, and migration into fiction. The Shadow Lines (1988) braids Calcutta, Dhaka, and London across generations, using a family's fractured memories of 1960s communal riots to argue that national borders are drawn in the mind before they're drawn on any map.

He later expanded his historical reach dramatically with the Ibis trilogy, following indentured laborers and opium traders across the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean, and turned increasingly toward climate writing, arguing in nonfiction like The Great Derangement that literary fiction has failed to reckon with ecological catastrophe.

He was the first English-language writer to win India's Jnanpith Award, and continues to divide his time between India and the United States.