Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies (2008) opens in the poppy fields of Bihar and aboard the Ibis, a former slaving ship refitted to carry indentured labourers across the Indian Ocean in the years before Britain's first war with China. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and became the first volume of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, closed in 2015 by Flood of Fire. Ghosh trained as an anthropologist, taking a doctorate at Oxford on fieldwork in an Egyptian village, and that habit of archival digging runs straight through the fiction. The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) begins in 1621 on the Banda Islands, where a Dutch company wiped out the people living there to seize the only ground where nutmeg then grew, and argues that the climate crisis descends from that same view of the earth as inert stuff to be used up. Ghosh, born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised across India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, took the Jnanpith Award in 2018, the first writer in English to receive it.