Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri[1] (born July 11, 1967) is an 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. Her second story collection 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. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America. In 2011, 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.[2][3]
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal.[2] She has been a professor of creative writing at Princeton University since 2015.[3]
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;[1] Lahiri considers herself an American and has said, “I wasn’t born here, but I might as well have been.”[1] Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island;[1] the protagonist in “The Third and Final Continent”, the story which concludes Interpreter of Maladies, is modeled after him.[4] Lahiri’s mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).[5]
When Lahiri began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, her teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her “proper name”.[1] Lahiri recalled, “I always felt so embarrassed by my name…. You feel like you’re causing someone pain just by being who you are.”[6] Her ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the mixed feelings of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his own unusual name.[1] In an editorial in Newsweek, Lahiri claims that she has “felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.” Much of her experiences growing up as a child were marked by these two sides tugging away at one other. When she became an adult, she found that she was able to be part of these two dimensions without the embarrassment and struggle that she had when she was a child.[7] Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989.[8]
Lahiri then received multiple 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 entitled Accursed Palace: The Italian palazzo on the Jacobean stage (1603–1625).[9] Her principal advisers were William Carroll (English) and Hellmut Wohl (Art History). She took a fellowship at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America, and who is now senior editor of TIME Latin America. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome[10][11] with her husband and their two children, Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005).[6] On July 1, 2015, Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.[12]
