Author Amitav Ghosh awarded Erasmus Prize for writings on climate crisis
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New Delhi:Author Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2024 on Thursday for his writings on climate change and human interactions with the environment.
Ghosh "receives the prize for his passionate contribution to the theme 'imagining the unthinkable', in which an unprecedented global crisis - climate change - takes shape through the written word," according to the Netherlands-based Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, which awards the prize each year, Scroll in reported.
Ghosh told X that he was "delighted and hugely honoured" to earn the award.
According to the foundation, the 67-year-old author shows through his writings “that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis that results from a dearth of the imagination”. It took notice of how he addressed issues like migration, diaspora, and cultural identity in his fiction and nonfiction.
According to the foundation, Ghosh conducted research on the Sundarbans' tidal landscape for his 2004 novel The Hungry Tide and "witnessed how climate change and rising sea levels were ravaging the area".
It further said: “In his compelling Ibis trilogy, set against the backdrop of poppy cultivation and opium wars, he shows how colonialism has left equally deep scars in the landscape.”
The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation stated that Ghosh's nonfiction books The Nutmeg's Curse and The Great Derangement cast light on a "disastrous vision that reduces the earth to raw material" and urged readers to consider climate change in the context of war and trade.
The Erasmus Prize is given to a person or institution who has "made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, social sciences, or arts, in Europe and beyond". It consists of a monetary award of 1,50,000 euros (approximately Rs 1.35 crore).