We are delighted to announce that Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Amitav Ghosh will give ODID’s Olof Palme Lecture on 20 March.

The lecture is titled “The Earth as Literary Critic: Climate Change and the Limits of Imagination” and will take place in the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s College, at 5 pm.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford, where he received a DPhil.

His first novel, The Circle of Reason, set in India and Africa and winner of the 1990 Prix Médicis Étranger, was published in 1986. Further books include The Shadow Lines (1988); In an Antique Land (1992); The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), winner of the 1997 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction; The Glass Palace (2000); and The Hungry Tide (2004). Sea of Poppies (2008), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and River of Smoke (2011), shortlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize, are his most recent novels, the first two in his Ibis trilogy.

Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He has taught at Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College, and Harvard.

In 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri Award for Arts and Literature, one of India’s highest honours.

The occasional Olof Palme lectures honour the murdered Swedish prime minister. We are very grateful to the Olof Palme Memorial Fund in Stockholm for their generous support.

To attend the lecture, please RSVP to Denise Watt, denise.watt@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Photograph: Ulf Andersen