Humanities Symposium

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh explores the climate crisis through multiple disciplinary lenses. In three short chapters: Stories, History, and Politics, which also address art, colonialism, and Laudato Si among other topics, Ghosh interweaves reflections on how we are constrained by our current modes of thinking and how we might find a way forward. 

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the juries of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. The Great Derangement was given the inaugural Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times.  Amitav Ghosh holds four Lifetime Achievement awards and five honorary doctorates. In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, 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 honor, 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. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. Headshot credit: Mathieu Genon.