In a first, recognition for an English writer, Amitav Ghosh has been announced as 2018’s Jnanpith Award winner for “outstanding contribution towards literature”.
Ghosh’s work, though fiction, finds an interconnection between the historical disturbances and the human distress spread across cultures and races. His academic background as a historian and a social anthropologist enable him to go to depths, not everyone can go.
Amitav Ghosh has explored Indian protagonists ranging across a wide international field, including Bangladesh, England, Egypt and Myanmar in both his fictional and discursive writings.
Born in Kolkata in 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, the 62-year-old author currently lives in New York with his wife Deborah Baker.
Amitav Ghosh, who spent his formative years in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Ghosh is also recipient of the Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award.
The Jnanpith Award is an Indian literary award for individual contributions to literature. It was instituted in 1961 by the cultural organization Bharatiya Jnanpith to honour the best creative literary writing in any of the 22 “scheduled languages’.
The winner gets a cash prize along with a citation and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning.
Picture Credit : Google
