Amitav Ghosh to get Tata LitFest lifetime achievement award 2016

Acclaimed Indian-American fiction author Amitav Ghosh has been named for this year's Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the Indian literary space, an official said on Tuesday.

The award will be presented to him at the upcoming four-day Tata Literature Live! annual awards ceremony scheduled for November 20 here.

"I am deeply honoured to be receiving this award... It's a privilege to be included in a list of such distinguished honorees," the 60-year-old Ghosh reacted.

Some of the past recipients have been Kiran Nagarkar, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Khushwant Singh, V.S. Naipaul and Mahasweta Devi.

Among the most celebrated writers in India, Ghosh has a universal following and is famed for the meticulous historical research that is woven into his writings.

Honoured with Padma Shri in 2007, Ghosh's some best known books, many of them award-winners, are 'Ibis Trilogy - Sea of Poppies', 'River of Smoke' and 'Flood of Fire', preceded by 'The Circle of Reason' and 'The Shadow Lines', which won the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Other books penned by him include 'The Calcutta Chromosome', 'The Glass Place', 'The Hungry Tide', 'In An Antique Land', 'Dancing in Cambodia', 'At Large in Burma', 'The Imam and The Indian', and the latest 'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and The Unthinkable'.

Ghosh's works have been translated into more than 20 languages and he has served on the juries of various international film festivals besides bagging the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal 2011.

During the Tata Literature Live!, seven other awards will be presented -- Book of the Year, Poet Laureate, Big Little Books, Sultan Padamssee Award for playwriting, in fiction and non-fiction categories.

Considered among the biggest international literary fests, Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest will be held here during November 17-20 at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Nariman Point, and the Prithvi Theatre, Juhu.

--IANS

qn/nir/vt