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Amitav Ghosh wins Dan David Prize

Jerusalem: Noted Indian author Amitav Ghosh has won the prestigious Dan David Prize for his remarkable reworking of the great tradition of the Western novel in transnational terms. The one million dollar award is a joint international enterprise endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. It is annually awarded in three different fields - Archaeology, Performing Arts and Material Science - in the three dimension time framework of past, present and future. Ghosh, 53 is the third Indian to win the award, joining an elite league comprising of chemist C.N.R. Rao and musician Zubin Mehta. The Indian author will be sharing the prize in the present dimension with Dr Gordon E. Moore, whose Moore’s Law has become the guiding principle for the semiconductor industry to deliver ever-more-powerful chips while decreasing the cost of electronics. "Ghosh’s work provides a transnational understanding of the self seen as the intersection of the many identities produced by the collision of languages and cultures; displacement and exile - lives torn between India, Burma, England, and elsewhere; families torn by the violence and psychological turmoil of colonial rule and post-colonial dispossession; a globe wracked by two world wars and their ancillary bloodshed", the jury wrote in their award conferring remarks. The above mentioned topics have been integral to his work right from his earliest novels, The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Shadow Lines (1990). The jury also recognised his contribution in fiction as distinguished equally by its precise, beautifully rendered depictions of characters and settings, and by its sweeping sense of history unfolding over generations against the backdrop of the violent dislocations of peoples and regimes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

                                                                                                               
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