It has a huge, Dickensian cast that includes a fallen Rajah, a Chinese opium addict, a European girl gone native, a cross-dressing reincarnated saint, an American freedman and a poppy-farmer's widow, and its plot takes in dramatic rescues, nefarious Brits, girls-dressed-as-boys, floggings and secret assignations and portentous items of jewelry. On the face of it, Sea of Poppies seems the more enjoyable. This rollicking adventure story about colonial India was beaten to the 2008 Booker Prize by The White Tiger, a novel that trades on its gritty realism but which is actually just as much a fantasy of Indian life as this one. He divides his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn. He is married to the writer, Deborah Baker, and has two children, Lila and Nayan. He no longer teaches and is currently writing the next volume of the Ibis Trilogy. He has taught at many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, the City University of New York and Harvard. Amitav Ghosh has written for many publications, including the Hindu, The New Yorker and Granta, and he has served on the juries of several international film festivals, including Locarno and Venice. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.

The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France's top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy.Īmitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide.

Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers.

Ghosh sea of poppies