Jhumpa Lahiri

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (Bengali pronunciation: [d͡ʒʱumpa laːɦiɽi]; 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 South Asian Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.

In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome and has since then published two books of essays, and began writing in Italian, first with the 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, then with her 2023 collection Roman Stories. She 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.

Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Hindu immigrants Amar Lahiri and Tapati "Tia" Lahiri (née Sanyal) from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her father hailed from Tollygunge. Her mother hailed from North Kolkata. Her father moved to London in 1966, followed by her mother in 1967. They lived in Finsbury Park. In 1969, her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was three. She has a sister, Simanti Lahiri, born in the United States in November 1974, who currently works for Rutgers University as a project coordinator.

Lahiri is both an American and a British citizen. According to Lahiri, she was an Indian citizen as she acquired an Indian passport and was appended to her mother’s passport. "It meant something to [her] mother emotionally," however, it "always seemed wrong" to her. She had to renounce her Indian citizenship when she became a naturalized American. It was only later that she received the British passport. Lahiri considers herself an "American" and has said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been."

After a year in Cambridge, her family moved to South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where Amar worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent", the story which concludes Interpreter of Maladies, is modeled after him. Tia, a schoolteacher, wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Her mother was an avid reader of Bengali literature and occasionally wrote Bengali poems. Lahiri recalled that her maternal grandfather, Phani Bhushan Sanyal, a visual artist who died when she was six, would invent stories to tell her. She can speak and understand the Bengali language fluently, but she cannot read it. It was the language she used to communicate with her parents, and she was "strictly forbidden" to speak any other language apart from Bengali until the age of four.

When Lahiri began kindergarten, her teachers called her Jhumpa, the name used at her home, because it was easier to pronounce than her more formal given name. Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." That was the time when she quickly acquired the English language, "but her parents, especially her mother, never liked her speaking it." She started to write as a child and would steal "one or two" extra notebooks from school closets, which marked her "first dishonest act", and would write fiction, mostly "stories about the victims of mean girls." She still prefers writing in notebooks. She never showed her writing to any adults. At the age of nine, she "self-published" her first book in 1976 The Life of a Weighing Scale (also titled The Adventures of a Weighing Scale), which she wrote from the perspective of a bathroom scale, for her school contest that she won and that "everyone had to write a book. The prize was that it got to be in the school library."

She loved acting in plays but was typically cast as the villain such as the Witch in "Hansel and Gretal", the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Fagin in Oliver Twist, as she thinks "that was partly because I wasn't blond and white, to cut to the chase." In her teenage years and beyond, the desire to construct stories were there but her "writing shrank in what seemed to be an inverse proportion to my years" due to her self-doubt and insecurity. She practised music and performed in plays. With the aspiration to be a journalist, she "worked with words" and wrote articles and essays.

Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years". In 1998, she published "Interpreter of Maladies", a short story that received positive reviews and was included in The Best American Short Stories 1999, edited by authors Katrina Kenison and Amy Tan. 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. Lahiri later wrote, "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." The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light." Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award).

In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake. The theme and plot of this story were influenced in part by a family story she heard growing up. Her father's cousin was involved in a train wreck and was only saved when the workers saw a beam of light reflected off a watch he was wearing. Similarly, the protagonist's father in The Namesake was saved after a train wreck because a rescuer's flashlight illuminated the fluttering white page of the father's book, written by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The father and his wife emigrated to the United States as young adults. After this life-changing experience, he named his son Gogol and his daughter Sonali. Together the two children grow up in a culture with different mannerisms and customs that clash with what their parents have taught them. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in March 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa".

Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, 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. The New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner stated, "It's hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction—particularly a book of stories—that leapt straight to No. 1; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's newfound commercial clout."

In February 2010, she was appointed a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others.

In September 2013, her novel The Lowland was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, which ultimately went to The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. The following month, it was also longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and revealed to be a finalist on October 16, 2013. However, on November 20, 2013, it lost out for that award to James McBride and his novel The Good Lord Bird.

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's fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Bengali communities with which she is familiar. 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 to hang onto the Indian tradition of a joint family, in which the parents, their children and the children's families live under the same roof.

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. As succeeding generations become increasingly assimilated into American culture and are comfortable in constructing perspectives outside of their country of origin, Lahiri's fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. She shows how later generations depart from the constraints of their immigrant parents, who are often devoted to their community and their responsibility to other immigrants.

When Lahiri began "writing seriously", she studied stories by James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf to understand narrative structure and character development. She is "eternally indebted" to William Trevor and Mavis Gallant. She also cites Dante and Horace as influences. She also cited short story writers Chekhov, Alice Munro, Trevor, Gallant, Gina Berriault, Andre Dubus, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Alberto Moravia, and Giorgio Manganelli. Her favourite novelist is Thomas Hardy. She has said that reading the diaries of authors Woolf, André Gide has been crucial for writing, particularly The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank which she first read, saying, "I still trace my writing back to her for that reason. I learned so much from her about how to be a writer, about how a writer inhabited life and space and listened to people and just saw things." She has also said that writing in her own diaries "become a laboratory for things that I do" and the Italian poetry collection Il quaderno di Nerina came from her diary writing.

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.

In September 2024, Lahiri withdrew her acceptance of the Isamu Noguchi Award given by the Noguchi Museum in New York City in protest over the museum's decision to fire three employees for wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestine. In October 2024, Lahiri signed an open letter alongside several thousand authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.

In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a Greek-Guatemalan American journalist who was then the deputy editor of TIME Latin America and is now its senior editor. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome from Brooklyn with her husband and their two children, Octavio (b. 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. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College.