BIOGRAPHY

Amitav Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, two collections of essays and nine novels. His books have won many prizes and he holds six honorary doctorates. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. He has also been awarded the Erasmus Prize and the Pak Kyongni Prize. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His latest publication is Ghost-Eye: A Novel. 

PROJECT : Intimations of Apocalypse: Catastrophist and Gradualist Imaginings of the Planetary Future

The world is currently in the grip of several intensifying crises: climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical instability, and so on. Given the scale of the disruptions that are already being felt around the planet, it is hardly surprising that many people who have come to be convinced that an apocalypse is inevitable and requires active planning and preparation. It is well-known now that some of the most powerful and best-informed people in the world, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Peter Thiel, are building enormously expensive and heavily fortified apocalypse shelters. This project seeks to understand the thinking behind these trends, and what it signifies for the future of humanity.