Today it is my immense pleasure and honor to welcome Amitav Ghosh to Speaking Out of Place to talk about his new novel, Ghost Eye. The novel is about reincarnation, but also a lot more. In our conversation we talk about the need to address the terrible set of environmental and other crises we face, and the seeming foreclosure of the imagination by the obsession with technology and the future it offers to us. Instead, we look to how we can fashion beginnings out of endings, aided by a renewed sense of wonder, curiosity, and awe. We turn to the body, to the haptic, and perhaps most important, to food as more than simply nourishment. In all this, story-telling, the revival of connections between living beings, and a deep sense of other times and places are central.
AMITAV GHOSH grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a Ph.D. 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 has received eight honorary degrees, six lifetime achievement awards and four honorary fellowships. 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. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025 he was awarded the Pak Kyongni Prize by South Korea’s Toji Foundation, and in 2026 he was given a Fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
