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.
Lahiri was born to Bengali parents from
Calcutta
(now Kolkata)?her father a university librarian and her mother a schoolteacher?who moved to London and then to the
United States
, settling in
South Kingstown
,
Rhode Island
, when she was young. 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 was encouraged by her grade-school teachers to retain her family nickname, Jhumpa, at school. Although she wrote prolifically during her precollege school years, she 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.
Britannica Quiz
The Literary World
While in graduate school and shortly thereafter, Lahiri 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 and provide 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.
Lahiri next tried her hand at a
novel
, producing
The Namesake
(2003; film 2006), a story that examines themes of
personal identity
and the conflicts produced by immigration by following the internal
dynamics
of a Bengali family in the United States. She 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. Her novel
The Lowland
(2013) chronicles the divergent paths of two Bengali brothers. The tale was nominated for both the
Man 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 honour the achievements of South Asian writers and “to raise awareness of South Asian culture around the world.”
Lahiri was presented a 2014 National Humanities Medal by U.S. Pres.
Barack Obama
in 2015. That same year she published her first book written in Italian,
In altre parole
(
In Other Words
), a meditation on her
immersion
in another culture and language. 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. These experiences inspired the
essay
collection
Translating Myself and Others
(2022).