Amitav Ghosh Wins Korea’s Top Literary Honour — the 14th Pak Kyongni Prize

Multi-award-winning author Amitav Ghosh has been awarded the 14th Pak Kyongni Prize, Korea’s most prestigious international literary honor, often called ‘Korea’s Nobel Prize in Literature.’

The jury praised him for expanding the frontiers of postcolonial and ecological literature and for giving voice to subaltern subjects, including nature itself. Selected unanimously after a year-long review that began with 113 novelists, Ghosh becomes the 2025 laureate.

Established in 2011 by the Toji Cultural Foundation in honor of novelist Pak Kyong-ni, the prize recognizes “the truest writer of our time” and carries Korea’s largest literary cash award.

Past laureates include Marilynne Robinson, Amos Oz, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and A.S. Byatt. Other winners include Richard Ford, Ismail Kadare, Amin Maalouf, Christoph Ransmayr, and Sylvie Germain.

Amitav Ghosh says, ‘I am thrilled and honored to have been awarded the Pak Kyongni Prize by South Korea’s Toji Foundation. It is a profound privilege to be a successor to writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Antonia Byatt and Ismail Kadare, and to be associated with the memory of Pak Kyongni, South Korea’s most beloved writer of the 20th century. 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. I am immensely grateful to the Toji Foundation for this great honor.’

Born in Calcutta and educated in Delhi, Oxford, and Alexandria, Ghosh is the author of The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy, The Great Derangement, Gun Island, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Jungle Nama, The Living Mountain, Smoke and Ashes, and Wild Fictions. His new novel Ghost-Eye releases this December.

His works, translated into over thirty languages, have earned him honors worldwide, including the Jnanpith Award (2019) and the Erasmus Prize (2024).

The 2025 Pak Kyongni Prize, hosted by the Toji Cultural Foundation and Wonju City and sponsored by Milim Syscon, will be presented on October 23 at Hotel Inter-Burgo, Wonju. The ceremony will mark the UNESCO City of Literature’s continued role as a hub of Korean and global literary exchange.