Amitav Ghosh

AMITAV GHOSH  (1956) is undoubtedly one of the leading names of contemporary Indian literature who was first introduced to Slovenian readers in 2008 when Cankarjeva založba published his novel The Hungry Tide. He was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied at the New Delhi University, then went on to complete a Ph.D. in anthropology at Oxford. His novels explore the topics of colonialism, migration and diaspora. His first novel The Circle of Reason (1986) was awarded France's Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel in 1990. In the same year, he won two prestigious Indian prizes for the novel The Shadow Lines, whose Slovenian translation will accompany the author's visit at the Fabula 2012 festival. His book The Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008. Amitav Ghosh's work has been translated into more than twenty languages while his essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times.

Amitav Ghosh: THE SHADOW LINES
In The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh masterfully interlaces two parallel stories. One is a first-person narrative of a boy who, having heard the stories of his cousin from England, creates a lively imaginary picture of dreamlike London; years later, when he visits the city for the first time, he is faced by a bitter realisation that the 'real' London does not match the city of his dreams.  In the second narrative, the author tells a story about the return of the boy's grandmother to her native Dhaka and about her memories of the times before Dhaka became a part of Eastern Pakistan. Ghosh's novel is marked by precise ethnological and thus exotically attractive descriptions of habits of the native population and the richness of colours and characters.