I stammered like a 16-year old girl meeting her favorite rock star. Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is easily one of the greatest novels by a modern writer I’ve ever read. His latest work is The Sea of Poppies. Ghosh along with a score other writers was participating at the Literary Festival at Suzhou’s Bookworm. The line-up at the Suzhou Festival I’ve found to be more engaging than the one at the M on the Bund, in Shanghai, happening near concurrently. Ghosh spoke to an audience of nearly fifty, discussing his evolution as a writer, his experiences in Indian boarding school and at Oxford, and his creative approach to writing. One of the more interesting statements he made during the evening, in response to a question from the audience, was that he welcomed the shift of wealth and power back from West to East: the last two or three hundred years of history, he considered, were “not natural” in world history.

Afterward, when all the other’s had had their books signed and had left for home, with only one woman after me, I told Mr Ghosh how wonderful The Glass Palace was: I had even invited three friends who were unfamiliar with his work to attend the session with me. I told him I was having my first book published this year – China Inside Out (John Wiley & Sons) – and how reading The Glass Palace had urged me to continue writing and exploring other cultures. When he patiently asked me what my book was about, I forgot. Complete blank. I blushed, stuttered something incomprehensible, thanked him for his time, then scampered away.

Such is the power of gentle genius.