Renowned author Amitav Ghosh, who was bestowed with the 54th Jnanpith Award, on Thursday said all his books address issues of “dislocation, migration, and movement.”
Ghosh became the first Indian writer in English to be conferred the Jnanpith Award by former Governor of West Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Wednesday.
On Thursday, he launched his new book Gun Island.
While launching the book, he also remembered Girish Karnad who passed away on Monday and told his son Raghu Karnad, who was hosting the event, that his father had done remarkable work.
“Life is sometimes more uncanny than we expect it to be. And it’s difficult to deny meaning in that uncanniness,” Ghosh said.
He also said that often when someone writes a novel, they realize that certain characters truly assert themselves and they become larger and larger than life while elaborating some details of his book’s main character ‘Dinanath’.
He also said that the question is “not how we are giving voice to animals and other forces in nature but the real question is how did we come to suppress these voices.”