The good listener: unearthing hidden tales from a strange land

Amitav Ghosh trudged through mangrove swamps inhabited by the last Bengal tigers and swam in crocodile-infested waters for his latest novel, The Hungry Tide.

The Oxford-trained anthropologist was less interested in describing the landscape and recording dialogue than listening to people for long enough to get the story itself from the people of the Sundarbans, the archipelago of 10,000sqkm of mangrove ecosystem in the Ganges Delta.

'My whole body of work has been founded on listening,' he says. 'My great passion is just listening to the stories that people have to tell. When many writers write, the essential struggle is with language, with the form. But for me it's always been life. It's been people. I've always paid a lot of attention to the way in which people talk about their world.'

Ghosh's focus on the margins has brought him as much praise as controversy. Born in India and based in New York, he has won France's Prix Medici Estranger, the Pushcart, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and Grand Prize at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards for The Glass Palace. But he withdrew the same novel from the Commonwealth Literary Prize in 2001, citing the award's imperial connotations. The book had already sparked furore in India for touching on the members of its military who switched sides to fight for the Japanese in the second world war.

The Hungry Tide raises more questions for Indians. 'Ever since it was released, I've been deluged with mail about it,' he says.

An hour's drive from Calcutta, this shoal of muddy delta islands is where the Ganges, known in Hindu myth as Shiva's heavenly braid, is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle.