Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture.
Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013), was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.

In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since then published two books of essays, and in 2018, published her first novel in Italian called Dove mi trovo and also compiled, edited and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers.

She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.

In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.

Early and personal life

Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American and has said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been."

Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island.
When Lahiri began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, her teacher decided to call her by her familiar name Jhumpa because it was easier to pronounce than her more formal given names.

Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989.

Lahiri then earned advanced degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation, completed in 1997, was titled "Accursed Palace: The Italian palazzo on the Jacobean stage (1603–1625)".

In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America, and who is now its senior editor. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome with her husband and their two children, Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005).

On July 1, 2015, Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Literary career

Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years". Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, the bereavement over a stillborn child, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants.

The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India.
Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake. Unaccustomed Earth, her second collection of short stories, was released on April 1, 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on The New York Times best seller list.

In February 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

In September 2013, her novel The Lowland was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. The following month it was also long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction.

In December 2015, Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called "Teach Yourself Italian" in The New Yorker about her experience learning Italian.

In 2017, Lahiri received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.

In 2018, Lahiri published her first novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo. In 2019, she compiled, edited and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories.

Literary focus

Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language and her characters, often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home.

Lahiri examines her characters' struggles, anxieties, and biases to chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant psychology and behavior.
Until Unaccustomed Earth, she focused mostly on first-generation Indian American immigrants and their struggle to raise a family in a country very different from theirs.

Her stories describe their efforts to keep their children acquainted with Indian culture and traditions and to keep them close even after they have grown up.

Unaccustomed Earth departs from this earlier original ethos, as Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of development. These stories scrutinize the fate of the second and third generations.

Television

Lahiri worked on the third season of the HBO television program In Treatment. That season featured a character named Sunil, a widower who moves to the United States from India and struggles with grief and with culture shock. Although she is credited as a writer on these episodes, her role was more as a consultant on how a Bengali man might perceive Brooklyn.

Awards

1993 – TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation
1999 – O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies"
1999 – PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies"
2000 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut "Interpreter of Maladies"
2008 – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"
2014 – DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for The Lowland
2014 – National Humanities Medal
2017 – Pen/Malamud Award
2023 – Honorary Doctorate from The American University of Rome in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to literature in English and Italian.

Works

Novels

The Namesake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2003.
The Lowland (2013)
Dove mi trovo (in Italian). Milan: Guanda. 2018. ISBN 978-88-235-2136-0.
Whereabouts. Translated by Lahiri, Jhumpa. New York: Knopf. 2021. ISBN 978-0-593-31831-7.

Short story collections

Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
Racconti romani (in Italian). Rome: Guanda. 2022.

Stories

Lahiri, Jhumpa (June 10–17, 2013). "Brotherly Love". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 17. pp. 70–89.
Lahiri, Jhumpa (January-29-2018). "The Boundary" . The New Yorker.
Lahiri, Jhumpa (February-8-2021). "Casting Shadows" . The New Yorker.

Poetry

Il quaderno di Nerina (Italian) (2020)

Nonfiction

Books

In altre parole (Italian) (2015) (English translation published as In Other Words, 2016)
Il vestito dei libri (Italian) (English translation published as The Clothing of Books, 2016)
Translating Myself and Others (2022)

Essays, reporting and other contributions

"Cooking Lessons: The Long Way Home" (September 6, 2004, The New Yorker)
"Improvisations: Rice" (November 23, 2009, The New Yorker)
"Reflections: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship" (June 13, 2011, The New Yorker)
Lahiri, Jhumpa (December 7, 2015). "Teach yourself Italian". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 91, no. 39. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. pp. 30–36.

Translations

Ties (2017), translation from Italian of Domenico Starnone's Lacci
Trick (2018), translation from Italian of Domenico Starnone's Scherzetto
Trust (2021), translation from Italian of Domenico Starnone's Confidenza

Jhumpa Lahiri