Already winner of the 2023 Pistoia International Dialogues Prize in 2023, Indian writer and Elastica speaker Amitav Ghosh has now been awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize for his writing on climate change.

“He receives the prize for his passionate contribution to the theme ‘imagining the unthinkable’, in which an unprecedented global crisis – climate change – takes shape through the written word,” stated the Utrecht-based Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, which annually awards the Prize to a person or institution that has made an outstanding contribution to the humanities, social sciences or arts.

“Ghosh has delved deeply into the question of how to do justice to this existential threat that defies our imagination. His work offers a remedy by making an uncertain future palpable through compelling stories about the past. He also wields his pen to show that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis that results from a dearth of the imagination”.

“So this just happened… needless to say, I am delighted and hugely honored! It’s an incredible privilege to follow in the footsteps of legends like Trevor Noah, A.S. Byatt and Barbara Ehrenreich,” wrote Shosh on his social media.

The anthropologist, writer and journalist Amitav Ghosh will be in Italy in July and November 2024, for info and availability write to contact-ghosh@elastica.eu.