Jhumpa Lahiri

Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri was born in London on July 11, 1967, to Bengali parents from Calcutta. Her family later moved to the United States, settling in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, where her father worked as a university librarian. Despite writing extensively in her early years, Lahiri’s commitment to a writing career solidified after completing her extensive education, including a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989 and multiple master’s degrees and a doctorate from Boston University in the 1990s. During this period, she refined her craft under the guidance of Elie Wiesel, drawing inspiration from a range of literary figures such as Mavis Gallant, William Trevor, and Virginia Woolf.

Lahiri’s literary career gained significant momentum with her debut short story collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” published in 1999. This collection, which explores themes of arranged marriage, alienation, and cultural loss among East Indian immigrants and Calcuttans, earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, “The Namesake” (2003), continued to explore the complexities of identity within a Bengali-American family, receiving widespread acclaim and a film adaptation in 2007. She further cemented her reputation with “Unaccustomed Earth” (2008), another successful short story collection that debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel “The Lowland” (2013) was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and she received the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2015.

A significant turning point in Lahiri’s career was her move to Rome in 2012, where she began writing exclusively in Italian. This linguistic immersion resulted in works such as “In altre parole” (2015), a meditation on her journey with the Italian language, and the novel “Dove mi trovo” (2018), which she later translated into English as “Whereabouts” (2021). Her dedication to translation also extended to other Italian authors, inspiring her essay collection “Translating Myself and Others” (2022). Lahiri has received numerous honors beyond literary awards, including induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012, a National Humanities Medal in 2014, and the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2017. She has held academic positions, serving as a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and later as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College.