New Delhi: Celebrated English author Amitav Ghosh will be honoured with this year’s Jnanpith award, the country’s highest literary award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to literature.
The selection committee of Bharatiya Jnanpith, headed by eminent novelist and Jnanpith laureate Pratibha Ray selected Ghosh for the 54th award, describing him as a “path-breaking novelist”.
“I am truly honoured and humbled”, Ghosh tweeted after the jury nominated him for the award.
“Thank you. This is an amazing day for me. I never thought I would find myself on this list, with some of the writers I most admire,” he responded to the congratulatory messages.
Some of his best known and celebrated works include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy.
His most recent book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016.
“In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways. His fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist,” Bharatiya Jnanpitch said in a statement.
Ghosh’s Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes in 1990 — the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar.
In 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.
Born in then Calcutta in 1956, Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times.
He spent his formative years in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria.
His works have been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001) as well.
