BA Book Prize reading list: Amitav Ghosh’s picks

To celebrate this year’s British Academy Book Prize, we’ve asked all of the shortlisted authors to tell us about the books they’ve been reading. Next up is Amitav Ghosh, whose book Smoke and Ashes, a travelogue, memoir and history that tells the story of the global opium trade, is nominated for this year’s prize.

Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”: In these powerful yet elegant essays Emily Raboteau shows us again and again how multiple vectors of the planetary crisis – biodiversity loss, climate change, migration, racial divisions, pandemics – impinge upon our everyday lives, often in deeply personal and surprising ways. For anyone looking for lessons on how to write about our increasingly disrupted world, this is the book they need.

Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years: Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth is a marvelously erudite and wide-ranging account of the steadily accelerating ecological transformation of the planet since the 12th century. An indispensable contribution to both environmental and global history. 

Mary Annaïse Heglar’s Troubled Waters: Troubled Waters is an absorbing story of a young woman’s journey towards an act of redemptive protest after growing up amidst the climatic and racial traumas of southern Louisiana. Mary Annaïse Heglar has a gift for evoking landscapes and drawing characters. And her descriptions of food are so vivid that one can almost catch the smell of biscuits baking in the kitchen of the protagonist’s strict but loving grandmother.

Find out more about Smoke and Ashes, and the rest of this year’s British Academy Prize shortlist, here.