Novelist Ghosh Visits

GAMBIER, Ohio (September 3, 2012)

Acclaimed cross-cultural novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh visits Kenyon on September 5 and 6 for a lecture and reading.

Ghosh, a native of India, will discuss "China and the Making of Modern India" on Wednesday, September 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Higley Auditorium, and will do a reading of his work on Thursday, September 6, at 11:10 a.m. in the Community Foundation Theater at the Graham Gund Gallery. The events are free and the public is encouraged to attend.

"Amitav Ghosh sees the world through the many connections among its people and cultures," said Wendy Singer, Roy T. Wortman Professor of History. "He writes beautifully descriptive novels with characters who all have complex cultural identities, demonstrating that we live in a world in which the idea of a cultural 'other' is difficult to find, let alone define." His essays and fiction are a mainstay in the Kenyon curriculum, Singer said.

Born in Calcutta and reared in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Ghosh's work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of In an Antique Land, The Shadow Lines, Sea of Poppies, and River of Smoke, among others. His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times and have been published in the anthologies The Imam and the Indian and Incendiary Circumstances. He has won many international awards and has taught at Delhi University, Queens' College, Columbia University, and Harvard University.

An appearance by Ghosh is "not to be missed," said David H. Lynn, editor of the Kenyon Review and professor of English. Ghosh, he said, "is one of the most widely admired novelists on the international scene today."