New Delhi: The Jnanpith Selection Board has announced the recipient of the 54th Jnanpith Award for the year 2018 in a meeting. It went to Amitav Ghosh, eminent Indian novelist writing in English.
The decision was taken in a meeting of Jnanpith Selection Board chaired by its Chair person. Other eminent persons of the selection board are Prof. Girishwar Misra, Prof. Shamim Hanfi, Prof. Harish Trivedi, Prof. Suranjan Das, Prof. Purushothama Bilimale, Shri Chandrakant Patil, Dr. S. Mani Valan, Shri C. Radhakrishnan, Prof. Asghar Wajahat and Shri Madhusudan Anand.
Born in 1956 in Kolkata, West Bengal, Amitav Ghosh is a path- breaking novelist. In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways. His fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist. His major thematic concerns include migration and interconnections across places, cultures and races, and human distress and suffering caused by historical turbulences, especially at the level of girmitiyas, coolies and lascars.
Amitav Ghosh has explored Indian protagonists ranging across a wide international field, including Bangladesh, England, Egypt and Burma/Myanmar in both his fictional and discursive writings. Some of his celebrated creations include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and the Ibis trilogy that includes Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire.
He is the recipient of many coveted awards that include Sahitya Akademi Award, Ananda Puraskar, Crossword Book Prize, Prix Médicis Award from France and was short listed for the Man Booker Prize, 2008. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
