In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France's top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar.

He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy.Īmitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive - a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of China. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan.

As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean its purpose, to fight China's vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis.

Sea of poppies trilogy