Amitav Ghosh is an acclaimed Indian author, born in Calcutta in 1956. He is known for his fiction and non-fiction books, which explore the personal and national identity of people from India and South Asia origins. Ghosh was born into a Bengali Hindu family and spent his childhood traveling due to his father's job as a diplomat. This exposure to diverse cultures of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Iran, among others, significantly influenced his writing.
Ghosh earned his doctorate from Oxford and has had an illustrious teaching career, having taught at several universities in India and the United States, including Delhi University, Columbia, the City University of New York, and Harvard. He is currently married to writer Deborah Baker and is the father of two children, Lila and Nayan. Ghosh is a prolific writer and has published several notable books such as "The Circle of Reason," "The Shadow Lines," "In An Antique Land," "Dancing in Cambodia," "The Calcutta Chromosome," "The Glass Palace," "Incendiary Circumstances," and "The Hungry Tide." His works have received numerous accolades, including the Prix Medicis Etranger, Sahitya Akademi Award, Ananda Puraskar, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards, and the Hutch Crossword Book Prize. Ghosh currently spends his time between Kolkata, Goa, and Brooklyn, focusing on writing the next volume of the Ibis Trilogy.