Latest news with #AmitavGhosh
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Next manuscript by Amitav Ghosh to be kept sealed for 89 years
The next manuscript by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh will not be read for 89 years, as he becomes the 12th author to contribute to the Future Library project. Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which are locked away until 2114. The texts are stored in a specifically designed silent room in the Deichman Bjørvika building at the public library in Oslo. At the end of the project, the full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from trees from the Future Library forest in Nordmarka, in northern Oslo, where 1,000 spruce trees were planted by Katie Paterson, the artist behind the project, in 2014. Ghosh, whose novels include The Circle of Reason and Sea of Poppies, said being invited to participate in the Future Library project was a 'profound honour and a humbling act of trust'. The initiative 'compels us to think beyond our lifetimes, to imagine readers who have not yet been born'. 'It is particularly significant for me that the project has a forest at its core,' he added, 'because for a long time now, I have been writing about a forest, albeit of an entirely different kind – the great mangrove forest known as the Sundarban.' Stretching across the Ganges delta, the Sundarbans are the backdrop to Ghosh's novels The Hungry Tide, Jungle Nama and Gun Island. 'It will be an exciting challenge to make a connection between the forests of the far north and those of the tropics, at this time of extreme planetary crisis,' added Ghosh, whose works often address climate disaster. 'I am moved to be part of a work that intertwines ecology, literature and patience on such a monumental scale.' Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has written a number of novels, as well as works of nonfiction and essay collections. Ghosh's writing 'is expansive, urgent, and deeply attuned to the shifting ground of our world', said Paterson. 'His stories traverse oceans and centuries, revealing how the climate crisis is inseparable from histories of empire, migration and myth.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion 'With a rare ability to weave the intimate with the planetary, the visible with the invisible, Ghosh gives voice to the forces – human and more-than-human – that shape our shared future,' she added. Ghosh will submit his manuscript at a ceremony in the Future Library forest in May or June 2026, when the work's title will be revealed. Along with Atwood, Han and Vuong, other writers to have contributed to the project include David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky, Valeria Luiselli and, most recently, Tommy Orange. In June 2022, the City of Oslo signed an agreement which ensures the forest remains in the hands of the Future Library Trust for the duration of the project.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Next manuscript by Amitav Ghosh to be kept sealed for 89 years
The next manuscript by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh will not be read for 89 years, as he becomes the 12th author to contribute to the Future Library project. Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which are locked away until 2114. The texts are stored in a specifically designed silent room in the Deichman Bjørvika building at the public library in Oslo. At the end of the project, the full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from trees from the Future Library forest in Nordmarka, in northern Oslo, where 1,000 spruce trees were planted by Katie Paterson, the artist behind the project, in 2014. Ghosh, whose novels include The Circle of Reason and Sea of Poppies, said being invited to participate in the Future Library project was a 'profound honour and a humbling act of trust'. The initiative 'compels us to think beyond our lifetimes, to imagine readers who have not yet been born'. 'It is particularly significant for me that the project has a forest at its core', he added, 'because for a long time now, I have been writing about a forest, albeit of an entirely different kind – the great mangrove forest known as the Sundarban'. Stretching across the Ganges delta, the Sundarbans are the backdrop to Ghosh's novels The Hungry Tide, Jungle Nama and Gun Island. 'It will be an exciting challenge to make a connection between the forests of the far north and those of the tropics, at this time of extreme planetary crisis,' added Ghosh, whose works often address climate disaster. 'I am moved to be part of a work that intertwines ecology, literature and patience on such a monumental scale.' Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has written a number of novels, as well as works of nonfiction and essay collections. Ghosh's writing 'is expansive, urgent, and deeply attuned to the shifting ground of our world', said Paterson. 'His stories traverse oceans and centuries, revealing how the climate crisis is inseparable from histories of empire, migration and myth.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion 'With a rare ability to weave the intimate with the planetary, the visible with the invisible, Ghosh gives voice to the forces – human and more-than-human – that shape our shared future,' she added. Ghosh will submit his manuscript at a ceremony in the Future Library forest in May or June 2026, when the work's title will be revealed. Along with Atwood, Han and Vuong, other writers to have contributed to the project include David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky, Valeria Luiselli and, most recently, Tommy Orange. In June 2022, the City of Oslo signed an agreement which ensures the forest remains in the hands of the Future Library Trust for the duration of the project.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Ruth Jones Leor Zmigrod Gabriel Gatehouse
From a Gavin and Stacey star reading from her latest novel set on a Scottish island, to talk of shutting down the internet to save the planet with Amitav Ghosh and the psychology of extremism with Leor Zmigrod, it's been another varied few days at the Book Festival for David Robinson Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's good to have expectations challenged, so when Ruth Jones – as Welsh as the red dragon tattoo on the arm of Nessa, her character in Gavin and Stacey, read from her latest novel, By Your Side, largely set on a Scottish island, and with a Hamilton-based first person narrator, I wouldn't have been the only one in the audience to be mildly surprised that she not only sounded like Lorraine Kelly but looked a bit like her too. Ruth Jones | Contributed After a bit of faff over feedback at the start, this turned out to be a very enjoyable event as she spilled some of the behind-the-scenes stories from Gavin and Stacey (there'll be more in October the book she and James Corden have co-written), and traced her writing career from Fat Friends onwards. Most of us, though, were there for Vanessa Shanessa, and she didn't disappoint, slipping into character at the end to tell us that she and event chair Val McDermid were collaborating on a novel, When Bryn Found The Barry Body. 'I have been mentoring her,' she said, 'and I'm not going to lie, it's going to be quite dark.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Most writers who come to this book festival tend to say nice things about the Scottish Enlightenment, so it was refreshing to hear Amitav Ghosh tear into it as the font of every bad idea around. In fairness, the Dutch East India Company also got a kicking for pioneering genocidal capitalism, but Adam Smith is clearly a Ghosh bête noir. 'Free trade was the whole justification for poisoning millions of Chinese and Indians in the Opium wars of the 1830s', he said, where the 'mainly Scottish opium traders operated like a mafia'. His solution for the world's present-day ills? Back to nature, support indigeneity and vitalism. Give rivers and mountains legal rights, live in greater harmony with nature (yes, fine) and if you really want to stop the illegal migration, shut down the internet. Er, not too sure about that one. Political neuroscience is new to me, and so is psychologist Leor Zmigrod, so I'll start with Jacob Chansley instead. If you don't know who he is, you've forgotten all about the bare-chested spear-wielding QAnon shaman wearing a racoon fur hat with bison horns who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, 2020 along with 6,000 other conspiracy theorists who refused to believe Donald Trump had lost the US election. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Zmigrod's fellow-panellist Gabriel Gatehouse, then Newsnight's international editor, had a sinking feeling when he saw those scenes on television. He had, he realised, just missed a scoop. Back in November, he'd talked to Chansley but not filmed him. Pleasant chap, apparently, but what with believing all that stuff about the US being ruled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles, obviously crazed. This is where Zmigrod comes in. When we look at political extremists and conspiracy nuts, she says, we shouldn't look at things like their age, education, class, race – or bison-horned headdresses. We should look instead at their minds. If we do that, and give them a few card-game psychological tests, it's easy to work out who will be a dogmatic, possibly extremist thinker, and who won't. Apparently, this works with leftists, rightists – and even dogmatic centrists. The roots of conspiracy theories are varied and Gatehouse explored them engagingly in his two events on Tuesday. Social media spins more of us into them than newspapers ever did, and children are increasingly prey to them – though education can promote the kind of flexibility of thinking that doesn't allow them to seed. Creativity helps too, said Zmigrod. And so, I suppose, do book festivals.
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Save rivers, pleads Robert Macfarlane
In his latest book, Wild Fictions, Amitav Ghosh writes about the role of a novelist as opposed to that of a historian. 'The historian's past has a sweep that the novelist's doesn't. The difference is between observing the flow of a river from the shore and from within the waters: the direction of the current is the same in both cases, but a swimmer, or a fish, has at every moment a million different choices and options.' The point that Ghosh, reflecting on his own work as a novelist is making, is that of immersion. Novelists have to respond to what characters feel, touch and fall into, unlike historians who may discuss wider trends. Natural spirits Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is not a novel, yet he dips into the waters, novelist-style, of the characters that pepper the pages, mycologists, musicians, activists, grieving friends, hermits, and rivers. The book takes us in close proximity to three rivers, and the perils they face – the mist-shrouded Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the deadened Adyar in Chennai, and the turbulent Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. What Macfarlane attempts is more than a simple personification of rivers. By visiting each river, navigating them, and staying by them, he attempts a character sketch which is at once bewildering and animated. To save a river, one might expect a tabling of their ecosystem services, their PH values, their gallons of water, irrevocable proof. Yet the book offers something different: it suggests that rivers are too much of the 'other' to be neatly tabulated. Macfarlane makes the political choice of rebelling against human-made boxes, painting a complex picture that is beyond simple objectivity. It suggests older ways of knowing rivers. Ecologists might call this 'ecological character,' a word that exists in India's Wetland rules (2017). The author suggests an animacy of the river beyond human-centring: this isn't anthropocentric, it is enlarging the meaning of life, he argues. In 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand delivered a landmark judgment, emphasising the 'physical and spiritual sustenance' of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, making them legal persons. This was later stayed by the Supreme Court. Life at Ennore creek The book takes us close to the people who think in this manner and defend rivers. The mist-laden Los Cedros is threatened by gold mining, yet this is a reserve that was protected by law in a landmark judgment that upheld the Rights of Nature and protected the reserve from mining. We meet Giulina Furci, who finds fungi new to science in the shadow of the river. The Adyar river and Ennore creek are polluted beyond belief, yet the author finds life struggling through while walking with environmentalist Yuvan Aves. The eddying Mutehekau Shipu is threatened by a dam, yet we see why the river means so much (a legal person with a right to live as per Innu declarations) even as the human party gets bitten by blackflies. This book is entirely show, not tell. There are no sermons on why you must protect nature, only monographs on what, or who, the rivers mean. In the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, the book offers a view of the world where the person and the river, or the person and nature, are seen in relation to each other. 'To be is to be related,' as Aves says in the book. New ways of seeing The author offers a vocabulary for this new way of seeing the world, a world-building, so to speak, in which rivers write time and features: he cites the Maori phrase—'Who are your waters' (mine, for example, would be the Yamuna), he writes on the Los Cedros: 'River and cloud can't be separated—each authors the other.' When a river spiral throws him upstream, he suggests he is going back in time. In a dream, he sees 'grief-cutter ants,' a play on leaf-cutter ants. Macfarlane thus moors his identity around rivers, the riverbed and the catchment—'everyone lives in a watershed.' Each character we meet is carrying grief: the death of a parent, the death of a sister, the death of a friend, the death of landscapes. It is the river that heals them, gives them purpose, buoys sinking spirits. Returning to Wild Fictions, one more parallel rings true. Ghosh writes: 'High modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes… We are slowly beginning to understand that in order to hear the earth, we must first learn to love it.' Love, grief, and hope flow through this book. Let the author lead you downstream, let the river toss you and nourish you, and then you can answer the title's question for yourself. The reviewer is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful - Tales of 15 Iconic Indian species.
Korea Herald
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Salwa Bakr, Amitav Ghosh, John Banville named finalists for 14th Pak Kyongni Prize
Egyptian writer Salwa Bakr, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh and Irish author John Banville have been nominated for the 14th Park Kyongni Award, according to the Toji Cultural Foundation on Thursday. The judging committee conducted a review of writers from around the world starting in September last year and narrowed down this year's candidates to three. The winner will be announced in September. Bakr, known for her novels "The Man from Bashmour" and "The Golden Chariot," has consistently highlighted the struggles of women across various social classes, earning her high praise. Ghosh has written a vast body of work, from historical novels to journalistic essays, discussing topics like colonialism and climate change. He received the Jnanpith Award in 2018, India's oldest and highest literary honor. Notable works include the Prix Medicis-winning "The Circle of Reason" and the Booker-shortlisted "Sea of Poppies." Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize (now the Booker Prize) for his novel "The Sea," is acclaimed for his intricate and elegant portrayals of themes ranging from science and art to religion. He has written three trilogies, including "The Frames Trilogy," which includes Booker-nominated "The Book of Evidence." The Park Kyongni Award is an annual international literary award based in Korea. It was established in 2011 to honor the literary legacy of novelist Pak Kyong-ni (1926-2008), renowned for her epic saga 'Toji (The Land).' The 16-volume series tells the story of five generations of a wealthy Korean family from South Gyeongsang Province, from the end of the Joseon era (1392-1910) to Japanese occupation and Korean independence. Pak wrote the story from 1969 to 1994. The literary award aims to recognize novelists worldwide who have significantly influenced the course of literature while preserving its intrinsic value, according to the Toji Cultural Foundation. The prize comes with a certificate of merit, a plaque and an award of 100 million won ($73,060). Previous recipients include inaugural winner Choi In-hoon, author of 'The Plaza,' Bernhard Schlink from Germany, Amos Oz from Israel, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya, Richard Ford from the US, Ismail Kadare from Albania and Yun Heung-gil from Korea. In 2024, French writer Sylvie Germain received the award.
