Amitav Ghosh, born 1956 in Calcutta, is an Indian author, known for his work in the English language. He was educated at The Doon School, where he was a younger contemporary of Vikram Seth, St. Stephen's College, Delhi, Delhi University and Oxford University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology. Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of 'In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding' (1993) and a senior editor at Little Brown and Co., and his children Lila and Nayan.In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College in the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. His latest work of fiction, 'The Hungry Tide' was published in April, 2004. His other novels are 'The Shadow Lines' (1990), 'In An Antique Land' (1994), 'The Circle of Reason' (1986), 'The Calcutta Chromosome' (1995), and 'The Glass Palace' (2000). The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's most prestigious literary prize. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997. Ghosh also has three works of non-fiction to his credit. They are 'Countdown' (on India's nuclear policy) 'The Imam and the Indian' (a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture and literature) and 'Dancing in Cambodia', At Large in Burma.