Amitav Ghosh

Born in Calcutta, Amitav Ghosh earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford and did fieldwork in Egypt and Tunisia before returning to India in January 1982. He immediately began his first novel, The Circle of Reason—“literally that day,” he later remembered. But even after selling the book to a UK publisher, he struggled in Delhi. “When I said it wasn’t a textbook,” he said, “they weren’t interested.” Ghosh is the author of eight novels. He lives in Brooklyn and India.