Amitav Ghosh won the 54th Jnanpith Award. Ghosh is the first writer in English to have won this honour. 

"Amitav Ghosh is a path-breaking novelist. In his novels, Ghosh trends through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways.

According to a statement from Bhartiya Jnanpith read, his fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist.

Ghosh is known for a series of novels such as The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and Ibis Trilogy - Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire- charting the Opium trade between India and China run by the East India Company.