A Life in Letters: Amitav Ghosh on Craft and Vision in Writing
VIEW EVENT DETAILSEvening conversation with authors Amitav Ghosh and Xu Xi
Drinks Reception 6:30pm,
Discussion 7:00pm,
Close 8:30pm
Amitav Ghosh was born in Kolkata and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and the Ibis trilogy consisting of the novels Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). His most recent book is a work of non-fiction, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (forthcoming July 12, 2016).
The Circle of Reason 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 won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005, The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.
Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011, he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal.
Xu Xi is the author of ten books, including the novel That Man In Our Lives (C&R Press, September 2016). Forthcoming books include Interruptions (HKU Museum & Art Gallery, 2016), an ekphrastic essay collection in conversation with photography by David Clarke; a memoir, An Elegy for HK (Penguin China/Australia, 2017) and Insignificance: Stories of Hong Kong (Signal 8 Press, 2018). She is the co-founder, along with Robin Hemley, of Authors at Large, offering international writing retreats and workshops. A Chinese-Indonesian Hong Kong native and U.S. citizen, she currently lives between New York and Hong Kong. (Moderator)
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Event Details
Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty