London, Mar 8 (PTI) Indian author Amitav Ghosh has been awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize 2024 for his passionate contribution to the theme ‘imagining the unthinkable’ for bringing forth the global crisis of climate change through the written word.
Author of the bestsellers such as The Nutmeg’s Curse, The Hungry Tide, The Great Derangement among others, Ghosh, 67, was awarded the prize by the Netherland’s Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.
“Ghosh has delved deeply into the question of how to do justice to this existential threat that defies our imagination. His work offers a remedy by making an uncertain future palpable through compelling stories about the past,” the Foundation said in a statement here soon after the announcement.
He also wields his pen to show that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis that results from a dearth of the imagination, it said.
According to the Foundation’s website, the Erasmus Prize is a distinction for persons or institutions that have made an exceptional contribution to culture or scholarship, in Europe and beyond.
The Prize consists of a sum of money of Euro 150,000 and adornments designed by Bruno Ninaber van Eyben. The Patron of the Foundation presents the Prize during a ceremony that usually takes place at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.
“I am delighted and hugely honoured! It’s an incredible privilege to follow in the footsteps of legends like @Trevornoah, A.S Byatt and Barbara Ehrenreich,” Ghosh posted on his X handle after the announcement.
Born in Kolkata in 1956, Ghosh studied social anthropology at Oxford and divided his time between India and the United States. He has won multiple prizes, including the 2018 Jnanpith Award, the highest literary prize in India.
In 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from Maastricht University and was ranked by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the most important global thinkers of our time.
The Foundation lauded Ghosh, who the statement further said, has produced “a vast body of work, made up of both historical novels and journalistic essays” that carry the reader across continents and oceans.
“Each work is grounded in thorough archival research and succeeds in transcending boundaries and time periods with literary eloquence. Ghosh makes major themes such as migration, diaspora, and cultural identity tangible without ever losing sight of the human dimension,” it said.
Drawing from the rich history of the Indian subcontinent, Ghosh describes how, in that part of the world where he was born, the effects of natural catastrophes have been inextricably linked with human destiny for a very long time, the statement added.
Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands founded the Praemium Erasmianum, a cultural institution active in the fields of humanities, social sciences and the arts in 1958. PTI NPK NPK NPK
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