Amitav Ghosh writes with such tempered precision—his words so deftly chosen, the phrasing so carefully rendered—that, despite the often personal nature of his essays, it's difficult to picture the man behind the prose. The writer, like his works, maintains a certain distance. Yet Ghosh in conversation shows such commitment to his art and to his colleagues—whoever they may be at the time—that a genuine warmth ultimately shines through the reserve. Here, HBR gets his thoughts on grief, travel, and writing for an international audience.

HBR: Your essay on the death of your friend, the poet Ali, seems to turn the idea of journalistic writing on its head. It seems like you start with a frame of dates and events and then turn it into something much more personal.

AG: That particular essay, the one on Agha Shahid Ali, it was a very strange thing. He was a very close friend; one day he just called me up and... he knew he was dying. And he said, when I'm gone, I want you to write about me.

It's a very shocking thing to hear someone say it so bluntly. And from that day onwards I started making notes, and I started thinking of how I would write about him. It was a very difficult and wrenching thing to write, and very hard to write about a close friend, especially the death of a close friend. So it was something very hard to do, but I made myself do it. In large part it was that I felt I owed it to his memory. And I think he felt that he wanted me to memorialize him in this way. It was almost a kind of moral imperative.

HBR: Could you talk about the role of travel in your work?

AG: Travel has been absolutely central to my writing. A lot of my fiction is about diasporic community—Indians, Chinese, for example, Burmese, and so on. Those communities are very large, dispersed, and widely spread. It's not an easy thing to know about them or even to acquaint yourself with their history and their past. So I usually start writing a book because I'm drawn to it by a family story or something similar, which becomes a novel. But in order to research the background, I often do travel a lot; and sometimes when I'm traveling, I also write essays about it. It's hard to segregate things in one's mind. When I first went to Burma, I wasn't exactly sure what my book would be about. I just wanted to travel and see the place, and get a sense of who I could find and who I could speak to.

HBR: So does your nonfiction often play off your fiction in that way?

AG: It takes a lot from my fiction. I think if I weren't a writer of fiction, I wouldn't be writing the kind of nonfiction that I do. But I should say that my nonfiction is strictly nonfiction. When I write nonfiction, I'm very careful that it is nonfiction.

HBR: In the essay on your grandfather's books, you talk about the international canon, the international bookshelf. I was wondering to what extent you see an awareness of that canon in your students.

AG: I think students in America or in Europe, they're much more used to thinking of themselves as dealing with a national literature. They think of American literature, or English literature, or French literature. I think especially in Asia, people are much more inclusive in their approach to literature; literature means something. Everybody will have read Marquez and a certain number of writers. In some ways that was what interested me—I think in some strange way, writers in Asia and Africa are actually much more cosmopolitan than American writers, or British writers for that matter.

HBR: That's interesting, because it always seemed to me like the concept of the international style was a much more recent idea in America.

AG: Yes, here it's a much more recent idea. I think in some way, it's a very bad thing that people think of literature being so parochial. Because when American writers—even very accomplished American writers—do try to write about other places or other parts of the world, they often do it really badly. Often embarrassingly badly. It's not because they're bad writers; it's just because they've never turned their minds to this task.

HBR: Many of the essays in this new book have never before been published in the United States. Do you feel they might now be read differently by an American readership?

AG: Not just read. As a writer, I've seen for myself: in the last five years the space for publishing has really narrowed. ...I consider myself very fortunate to have this book published here. But old magazines, my old magazines that used to publish me before, won't publish me anymore. In the New Yorker, I wrote an article—this was before the Iraq war—on why this war is going to lead to a disaster. And everything I said has actually happened. But ever since then, they won't publish me anymore.

So you begin to see the ways in which the contours of discourse in the country are gradually narrowing. And it's a very sad thing because it's one of the great strengths in a way—the freedom of discussion, the plenitude of voices.