Amitava Kumar, Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English, is the author of The Green Book, recently published by HarperCollins India (December 2024), and the final volume in a trilogy that launched in 2022 with The Blue Book, a comprehensive perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic, and continued in 2023 with The Yellow Book, on overcoming adversity. Amitava offered readings from The Green Book at the Wayanad Literature Festival 2024 in Kerala, India, and book signings and interviews in the rest of the country.

With the support of Vassar’s Faculty Committee on Research, Amitava undertook a journey through small towns and cities beside the Ganges, from Devprayag, in the Himalayan foothills, to the Sundarbans, where the river empties into the Bay of Bengal. The result of this 2023 voyage was a diary of texts and original artwork titled Postcards from the Ganges, published by Brick, A Literary Journal for its Winter 2025 edition.

Additionally, Amitava’s novel My Beloved Life (Knopf) was among The Best Books of 2024 as compiled by The New Yorker magazine, and was also selected as a best fiction book of 2024 by The Hindu. Paperback editions of My Beloved Life and 2021’s novel A Time Outside This Time were issued this year by Penguin Random House, and the former was cited as a “Best Seller” in The New York Times (9 February 2025): “Alienation and guilt, the emotional markers of migration, loom large in Kumar’s ambitious and deceptive novel.”

Most recently, Amitava authored “The Weekend Essay” feature for The New Yorker magazine. “Travelling Through India on the Himsagar Express” was published on March 8, 2025.