Gillis Blue Humanities Forum: Amitav Ghosh

In this special lecture, Ghosh reflects on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami through the lens of storytelling, history, and environmental change. Drawing on his three-part essay exploring the disaster and its aftermath, Ghosh examines how the ocean connects cultures across vast distances and how moments of catastrophe reveal deeper histories of empire, migration, and ecological transformation.

Blending personal narrative with global insight, this talk invites us to consider what the sea remembers and what it asks us to remember in return.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford, and Alexandria and is the author of over 15 major works, including nine novels, several collections of essays, and notable non-fiction, including Sea of Poppies (Penguin Books, 2008), River of Smoke (Penguin Group, 2011), Flood of Fire (Penguin Books, 2015), The Shadow Lines (Ravi Dayal Publishers, 1988), The Glass Palace (HarperCollins, 2000), The Hungry Tide (HarperCollins, 2004), and The Calcutta Chromosome (Ravi Dayal Publishers, 1996).

The Circle of Reason (Hamish Hamilton, 1986) was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace (HarperCollins/Random House, 2000/2001) won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005, The Hungry Tide (Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2004) was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. They have been anthologized under the titles The Imam and the Indian (Ravi Dayal Publisher/Permanent Black, 2002 ) and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a work of nonfiction, was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018.

Ghosh holds five Lifetime Achievement awards and six honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, was conferred on Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Gillis Blue Humanities Forum is an interdisciplinary exploration of oceans, waterways, and aquatic life as central forces shaping culture, history, and environmental thought. Bringing together scholars, artists, and activists, the series invites audiences to rethink human relationships with water in an era of climate change and ecological urgency. This series was created in honor of John Gillis by his wife, Tina.