Amitav Ghosh, one of India’s finest novelists, will be visiting the University of Vermont for a week, beginning on Monday, March 10. He will be the guest of the English Department, coming here as the Buckham Scholar for Spring 2003. He’ll meet with a variety of classes in comparative studies and postcolonial literature, as well as with a special undergraduate seminar that is studying his novels.

Ghosh is regarded, along with V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Vikram Seth, as one of India’s most important novelists.

His work explores life in colonial and post-colonial situations, and ranges in form from magical realism to broad historical accounts, from complex narrative structures to science fiction. In fact, he won the Arthur C. Clarke Prize for Science Fiction, the first writer from a developing nation ever to win a prize in that genre.

He has also won the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Prix Medicis Etranger, and three of his books have been chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year.

Students in the Ghosh Seminar in the English Department have been particularly impressed by the deep humanity he brings to examining what it is like to live in the modern world – and by his awareness of the richness of the past. They have been finding each of his books – The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Calcutta Chromosome, In an Antique Land, and The Circle of Reason – exciting to read, challenging of routine expectations, and filled with new views of what it is to be human.

Ghosh will be giving a public talk at U.V.M. on Monday, March 10 at 5 P.M. in the Campus Center Theater. He subject will be Time, Myth and Historical Memory. All are invited to attend, and to speak with him afterwards at a public reception in the Marble Court of Fleming Museum.