Jnanpith for Amitav Ghosh

English writer Amitav Ghosh won the prestigious Jnanpith award for his outstanding contribution to literature.

“54th Jnanpith Award for 2018 goes to Amitav Ghosh,” the Bharatiya Jnanpith notified on its website on Friday. The selection board selected Ghosh at its meeting chaired by novelist and Jnanpith laureate Pratibha Ray.

“Amitav Ghosh is a path-breaking novelist. In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways. His fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist,” Bharatiya Jnanpith said.

Born in Kolkata in 1956, Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His debut novel, The Circle of Reason, won him one of the top literary awards of France, the Prix Médicis étranger, in 1990. His Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award.

“I am truly honored and humbled. This is an amazing day for me. I never thought I would find myself on this list, with some of the writers I most admire,” Ghosh said in a series of tweets.

Ghosh was honoured with Padma Shri in 2007. He was also conferred honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris.

His most recent book — The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable — was released in 2016.