Amitav Ghosh Biography

Indian novelist, travel writer, and anthropologist, born in Calcutta, educated at Delhi University and at Oxford. His writings in all genres display his experiences of a variety of cultures. His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), was praised by some critics for its spontaneity and vitality, but others found it derivative of Rushdie's Midnight's Children and the school of magic realism. His second, more original and accomplished novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), chronicles the intertwined destinies of an Indian and an English family over several decades and generations, and is particularly effective in its imagistic and documentary recreations of Ghosh's native Bengal. Though complex in structure and narrative technique, the novel indicates a return by younger Indian authors to a mode more sober than the flamboyant post-modernism of Rushdie and his imitators. In an Antique Land (1992) conflates fictional techniques and historical research in an ambitious evocation of Egypt's richly eclectic past and its increasingly puritanical present. Ghosh's accounts of his travels have appeared in Granta magazine.