Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri (born July 11, 1967, London, England) is an English-born American novelist and short-story writer whose works illuminate the immigrant experience, in particular that of East Indians. She won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Childhood and education

Lahiri was born to Bengali parents from Calcutta (now Kolkata) who moved to London. Her father, Amar Lahiri, was a university librarian, and her mother, Tapati Lahiri (née Sanyal), was a schoolteacher. When Lahiri was young, the family moved to the United States, settling in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Her parents nevertheless remained committed to their East Indian culture and determined to rear their children with experience of and pride in their cultural heritage. Lahiri used her family nickname, Jhumpa, at school because her teachers found it easier to pronounce and remember.

Although she wrote prolifically during her precollege school years, Lahiri did not embrace a writer’s life until after she graduated (1989) with a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College and obtained three master’s degrees (in English, creative writing, and comparative literature and arts) and a doctorate (in Renaissance studies) from Boston University in the 1990s. At the latter school, she studied writing under Elie Wiesel. Among the writers who influenced her are Mavis Gallant, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, Dante, and James Joyce.

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The Literary World

Interpreter of Maladies

In an essay published in Newsweek magazine in 2006, Lahiri revealed, “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.” While in graduate school and shortly thereafter, she published a number of short stories in such magazines as The New Yorker, Harvard Review, and Story Quarterly. She collected some of those stories in her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The nine stories, some set in Calcutta and others on the U.S. East Coast, examine such subjects as the practice of arranged marriage, alienation, dislocation, and loss of culture.

The collection was praised for its insight into the experiences of Indian immigrants as well as the lives of Calcuttans. Among the awards garnered by Interpreter of Maladies were the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2000 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.

The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland

Lahiri next tried her hand at a novel. The Namesake (2003; film 2006) follows the internal dynamics of a Bengali family in the United States and examines themes of personal identity and the conflicts produced by immigration. Like Interpreter of Maladies, it drew high praise and became a bestseller.

Lahiri returned to short fiction in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), a collection that likewise takes as its subject the experience of immigration as well as that of assimilation into American culture. The collection received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel The Lowland (2013) chronicles the divergent paths of two Bengali brothers. It was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize (now known as the Booker Prize) and the National Book Award and earned Lahiri the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, a prize established in 2010 by infrastructure developers DSC Limited to honor the achievements of South Asian writers and “to raise awareness of South Asian culture around the world.”

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Works in Italian and translations

In 2012 Lahiri moved to Rome, in part to develop fluency in Italian. As she told Harvard Business Review in 2022, “Italian was the language that called to me at a certain point, and then it became—quite surprisingly, but now rather definitively—the language of my creative expression, at least for the moment.” In 2015 she published her first book written in Italian, In altre parole (In Other Words), a meditation on her immersion in another culture and language. That same year she gave a speech about the art of book jackets at a literary festival in Florence; it was later published as The Clothing of Books (2016; Il vestito dei libri).

Lahiri continued writing in Italian, and in 2018 she released the novel Dove mi trovo (Whereabouts). She translated the work into English, and during this time she also began translating Italian-language books by other authors. Her translation of Domenico Starnone’s Trick (2018) was a finalist for a National Book Award for translated literature. These experiences inspired the essay collection Translating Myself and Others (2022). Of her translation work, Lahiri told Harvard Business Review, “I will always feel like an outsider wherever I am, and I continue to explore that in my work and my life. Translation is a way of insisting on that, because you are always on the outside of the text.”

In 2022 she published a collection of stories in Italian, Racconti romani. The following year it was published in English as Roman Stories; six of its stories were translated by Lahiri.

Honors

Lahiri was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and was presented a 2014 National Humanities Medal by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015. She received the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2017 and was named a Commendatore (commander) of the Italian Republic by Italian Pres. Sergio Mattarella in 2019.