Kolkata, January 11, 2019: Kolkata’s largest bookstore chain Starmark hosted at its South City Mall outlet here today eminent writer Amitav Ghosh’s book signing session followed by an interactive session with him.
Gyanpeeth Award winner Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on 11 July 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family. His contemporaries at The Doon School included author Vikram Seth and Ram Guha. After Doon, he received degrees from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and Delhi School of Economics. He then won the Inlaks Foundation scholarship to complete a D. Phil. in social anthropology at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, under the supervision of Peter Lienhardt. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.
Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding(1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan. He has been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative literature. He has also been a visiting professor at the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh subsequently returned to India began working on the Ibis trilogy which includes Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015).
He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2007. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2015 Ghosh was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow.
