Amitav Ghosh to deliver Global Cultures Institute annual lecture

15 October 2024

Amitav Ghosh to deliver Global Cultures Institute annual lecture

Author Amitav Ghosh will be presenting the Global Cultures Institute lecture on 28 November on the theme of ‘Writing and imagining history: narrating the Indian Ocean world’.

Amitav Ghosh. (Image: Mathieu Genon)

Dr Ghosh brings the Indian Ocean world to life through his fiction and non-fiction, highlighting the lives of the communities who live in the region’s various communities. This event will focus on the role of imagination in rethinking connections between people and culture on a global scale, with emphasis on India’s legacy of empire, capitalism, migration and mobility in the region.

These themes align with the Global Cultures Institute’s aim to talk beyond boundaries and understand the root of divisions in society.

I very much look forward to my visit to King's College London, and an interesting discussion of how storytelling shapes our understanding of the past.
Amitav Ghosh

I fell in love with Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies when it came out and The Ibis Trilogy is one of my favourite works of fiction – it is a remarkable literary achievement and an inspiration for the creation of the Global Cultures Institute. The story tracks the lives of characters crisscrossing the Indian Ocean, living lives that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries. It is a great honour for King's to host a writer and an intellectual of such global importance.
Professor Daniel Orrells, Chair-Director of the Global Cultures Institute

The event also marks the end of the India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s (IATIO) project, exploring Indian intellectualism and literary cosmopolitanism in the decolonisation period.

In recent years, Amitav Ghosh has concentrated on climate change and an environmental destruction, using both fiction and non-fiction to explore their linkages to capitalism and imperialism. Yet his prolific writings have never left the Indian Ocean world as the vast theatre for these complex histories against which he plots the lives of its human and non-human inhabitants. We are thrilled that the IATIO project gives Dr Ghosh the opportunity to speak about his long-term interest in the Indian Ocean world in connection with his mastery of the relationship between narrative and history.
Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA, Professor of English Literature

Tickets to the event are free; advance registration is required. Learn more and sign-up here.