Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.