Novelist Amitav Ghosh will receive with the Jnanpith Award, the country’s highest literary honour, PTI reported. The selection committee headed by Jnanpith laureate and novelist Pratibha Ray unanimously agreed on Friday that Ghosh should get the award this year.

“Amitav Ghosh is a path- breaking novelist,” a statement by the organisation said according to PTI. “In his novels, Ghosh treads through historical settings to the modern era and weaves a space where the past connects with the present in relevant ways. His fiction is endowed with extraordinary depth and substance through his academic training as a historian and a social anthropologist.”

Ghosh, who was born in 1956, writes both fiction and non-fiction. On Friday, the writer thanked the selection committee. “This is an amazing day for me,” he tweeted. “I never thought I would find myself on this list [of Jnanpith award recipients], with some of the writers I most admire.”

The Bharatiya Jnanpith, a literary organisation based in New Delhi, has been conferring the Jnanpith Award on writers every year since 1965.

Ghosh’s works include The Circle of Reason (1986), Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Sea of Poppies (2008). The Indian government awarded Ghosh the Padma Shri in 2007.