Indian novelist and Nobel Prize for Literature nominee, Amitav Ghosh on Thursday announced the launch of Equator, a new multi-media platform that aims to foreground alternative perspectives on a world “struggling to take shape amidst the ruins of the old one.”
In a post on X, Ghosh said he was proud to contribute a long-form piece for the platform’s first issue, focused on “apocalyptic imaginaries and their real-world consequences,” and urged readers to join and support the initiative at a time when “the Net is being siloed by billionaires.”
Founded by an international collective of writers and editors, Equator seeks to provide a cosmopolitan home for thought and art beyond the narrow boundaries of Western periodicals.
The publication’s founding statement says the idea was born in the winter of 2023, as writers and editors grappled with the images coming out of Gaza and the global silence surrounding the unfolding violence.
Besides Amitav Ghosh, novelist Pankaj Mishra and Sudanese-born journalist and author based in London, Nesrine Malik are also among the founding editors of Equator.
The team came together “to preserve [its] own sanity” and to resist what it calls “the regime of censorship and equivocation at so many prestigious periodicals.”
The founders argue that the genocide in Gaza exposed the collapse of the illusion that the West should determine the world’s future.
The decline of the “American Century,” they contend, has left a legacy media unable to interpret a rapidly changing global reality.
Having witnessed this “moral and intellectual decline”, the group says Equator was conceived to reject “boilerplate journalism” and “facile binaries,” aiming instead to restore dignity to truth and create a space for justice, solidarity and compassion.
According to its mission, Equator intends to “hold up a mirror to a global audience of readers and writers who don’t yet recognise themselves as belonging together.”
It envisions a movement that celebrates overlapping identities, shared global histories and a future of “fresh illuminations” beyond narrow nationalisms.
Positioned as both a movement and a magazine, Equator will publish long-form stories on politics, culture, literature and art, while also hosting public events, reading groups, screenings and exhibitions.
The project seeks to move beyond the binary constructs of “East” and “West” or “Global North” and “Global South,” aspiring instead to engage a new generation of writers and artists reflecting the shifts in global politics and the inner lives of individuals.
Its founders call Equator an attempt to “unravel the monotone global fabric forged during the era of Western dominance” and refashion it as “a tapestry with the colour and variety of the world as it exists.”
It embodies a belief that the future must be “actively conceived and vigorously fought for,” grounded in universal values of conscience rather than wealth and power.
The project has been funded by the Ford Foundation, which, according to information available on the foundation’s website, approved a grant of $100,000 in August 2025 and is registered in the United Kingdom under C/O Stone King LLP, Boundary House, 91 Charterhouse Street, London, EC1M 6HR.