Ghosh asserts that the extreme nature of today’s climate events make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of the writing of history, where the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications.

Join Ghosh for an examination of our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. His most recent novel is Gun Island, was released in September 2019.

He holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010 he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and 2011 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In 2018 the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, was conferred on Amitav Ghosh. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.

Part of the Climate Justice Series. Presented in partnership with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, Centre for Community Engaged Learning, and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.