Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is the award-winning author of nine novels and six nonfiction books (as of 2020). He was born in Kolkata, India and now divides his time between India and the United States. While The Great Derangement is primarily a text centered around the problem of climate change, Ghosh frequently uses incidents from his own life to illustrate his points. In Part I, for example, he recalls attending Delhi University in 1978 and surviving a catastrophic tornado. He uses this experience as an example of how difficult it can be for authors to include dramatic scenes of weather-related events in their novels. Later, he recalls realizing how vulnerable Kolkata is to severe flooding and talking to his mother about this, suggesting that she move. When she expressed her unwillingness to do so, he dropped the subject. This is an example of how easy it can be to remain...