Amitav Ghosh was awarded the 2025 Park Kyongni Prize, now in its fourteenth year, for “expanding the frontiers of postcolonial and ecological literature and for giving voice to subaltern subjects, including nature itself.”
Established in 2011 by the Toji Cultural Foundation in honour of novelist Pak Kyongni, the prize recognises “the truest writer of our time” and carries Korea’s largest literary cash award. Ghosh will receive the award, a cash prize of $100,000, on October 23 in Wonju, South Korea.
Past laureates include Marilynne Robinson, Amos Oz, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, AS Byatt, and Ismail Kadare, among others.
Ghosh has responded to the news by saying, “[…] The significance of this award is deepened for me by the fact it comes at a time when South Korea has established itself as a global superpower across the cultural spectrum, from K-pop to film and literature, the first non-western country to have done so in a very long time. The story of how the hallyu wave hit India, via Manipur and the Northeast, is a particularly fascinating one because it is a reminder that we live in an era when the world is being remade in many different ways, sometimes without our being aware of it. In this light, I am all the more moved that my work, often concerned with forgotten threads of history and voices that usually go unheard, including non-human ones, has found a resonance here.”
His next novel, Ghost-Eye, is forthcoming in December 2025.
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