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Indian writer Amitav Ghosh received the 2024 Erasmus Prize from the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for work that helps readers imagine climate change and an uncertain future through stories rooted in history. The award’s theme, “imagining the unthinkable,” frames the climate crisis not only as an environmental problem but also as a cultural and geopolitical one.
Why did Amitav Ghosh win the Erasmus Prize?
The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation recognized Ghosh for using literature to make difficult futures imaginable. Its 2024 award citation says: “His work offers a remedy, making an uncertain future palpable through compelling stories about the past.” The quotation is the Foundation’s assessment of Ghosh’s writing, not a statement by Ghosh himself.
The Foundation’s laureate profile connects the prize theme to climate change and describes the crisis as cultural as well as environmental. The citation puts that argument directly: “He also wields his pen to show that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis that results from a lack of the imagination.” In this view, the challenge is not just to understand environmental change, but to find ways to picture its consequences and reconsider humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
What does “imagining the unthinkable” mean?
The phrase describes literature’s ability to bring a seemingly distant or overwhelming future into focus. Ghosh’s work often approaches present-day crises through histories of colonialism, trade, migration and human encounters with nature. The Foundation argues that this historical grounding can help readers grasp an uncertain future rather than treat it as abstract or unimaginable.
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The award citation also asks readers to see climate change through the geopolitics of war and trade. That expands the frame beyond weather or landscape: the crisis is connected to systems of power and to ways of thinking that separate human interests from the rest of nature. The Foundation credits Ghosh with advocating a humanism that does not make that separation.
Which Amitav Ghosh books connect to the prize theme?
The Hungry Tide
The Foundation links this novel to Ghosh’s research in the Sundarbans, where he witnessed the effects of climate change and rising sea levels. The setting makes environmental change part of a lived landscape and human experience.
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The Ibis trilogy
Set against poppy cultivation and the Opium Wars, the trilogy explores colonialism and its lasting marks on the landscape. The Foundation highlights it as an example of Ghosh’s engagement with history and the forces shaping places and communities.
The Nutmeg’s Curse
This nonfiction book traces the planetary crisis to a worldview that treats the Earth as raw material. Its focus on the ideas behind exploitation connects closely to the prize’s cultural dimension.
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The Great Derangement
In this essay, Ghosh asks readers to consider climate change in the geopolitical context of war and trade. The Foundation’s profile names it as a work that directly articulates the connection between climate and geopolitics.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.About the award and its laureate
The 2024 Erasmus Prize was awarded by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to Amitav Ghosh, an Indian writer born in Kolkata in 1956. The Foundation says he studied social anthropology at Oxford and divides his time between India and the United States. The prize’s theme was “imagining the unthinkable,” focused on how climate change takes shape through the written word.
Readers looking for a direct entry point into the award’s central question can begin with The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which the Foundation specifically identifies in its profile. The Nutmeg’s Curse offers another route into Ghosh’s examination of the ideas underlying the planetary crisis. Neither book is itself the prize recipient; the award recognizes Ghosh and his body of work.
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