The Tagore Memorial Meeting

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Amitav Ghosh is one of the most talented English-language writers to have emerged from India in the past twenty years, and arguably the most international. In novels which include Circle of Reason, winner of the Prix Médicis Etranger, and The Shadow Lines, winner of the Shativa Akademi Award, and in such non-fiction books as In an Antique Land andThe Imam and the Indian, he has written about India, Bangladesh, Burma, Egypt, Cambodia, Britain and America. In 2008, he published Sea of Poppies, the first in a trilogy, set in 1838 just before the Opium Wars, and following an old slaving ship on a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean carrying a crew of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. Described as ‘a glorious babel of a novel, in which people speak everything from pidgin and Bhojupuri to the comically mangled English of a Bengali babu and a young Frenchwoman’, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Its keenly awaited sequel, River of Smoke was published in  June 2011. He speaks to prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. Chaired by Colin Thubron.

We are grateful to the Robert Gavron Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.

Recorded on Monday 6 June 2011.