Jhumpa Lahiri

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 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.

Early life and education

Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali immigrants Amar Lahiri and Tapati "Tia" Lahiri () from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her father hailed from Tollygunge. Her father moved to London in 1966, followed by her mother in 1967. In 1969, her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was three.

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. 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.

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. That was the time when she quickly acquired the English language, "but her parents, especially her mother, never liked her speaking it." 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.

Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She decided in college that she wanted to be an English professor. The thought of being a writer was low as she wanted to be an ordinary person. 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.

Literary career

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. 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. 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."

thumb|Lahiri in 2013

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. In the essay she declared that she is now only writing in Italian, and the essay itself was translated from Italian to English. That same year, she published her first book in Italian, In altre parole, in which she wrote about her experience learning the language; an English translation by Ann Goldstein titled In Other Words was published in 2016.

Lahiri was the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 for her book The Lowland at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, for which she entered the Limca Book of Records.

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 (2018). In 2019, she compiled, edited and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers. Lahiri later translated Dove mi trovo into English; the translation, Whereabouts, was published in 2021. In 2022, Lahiri published a new short story collection under the title Racconti Romani (Roman stories), the title being a nod to a book by Alberto Moravia of the same name. The English translation, Roman Stories, was published in October 2023, translated by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz.

A Netflix drama series adaptation of Unaccustomed Earth was announced in April 2025 and is in development. Production will be done by John Wells Production. The series stars Freida Pinto and Siddharth in main roles. Nisha Ganatra, Erica Saleh, Erin Jontow, Celia D. Costas and Lahiri all serve as executive producers. The series started filming in September 2025.

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'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.

Influences

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.

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.

Activism

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.

Personal life

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 (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005). In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College.

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.
2026 - St. Louis University Literary Award

Published works

Novels

The Lowland. New York: Knopf. 2013.
Published in English as

Short fiction

;Collections

Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
Racconti romani (2022) / Roman Stories (2023)

;Stories

{| class="wikitable"

! Title !! Publication !! Collected in

| "A Real Durwan" || Harvard Review (Fall 1993) || Interpreter of Maladies

| "Firoza and the Puzzle Maker" || New Letters 60.1 (1994) || -

| "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" || StoryQuarterly 30 (1994) || Interpreter of Maladies

| "Barter" || American Literary Review 7.1 (Spring 1996) || -

| "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" || Louisville Review (Fall 1996-Spring 1997) || rowspan=7| Interpreter of Maladies

| "A Temporary Matter" || The New Yorker (April 20, 1998)

| "Sexy" || The New Yorker (December 28, 1998)

| "Interpreter of Maladies" || Agni 47 (1998)

| "This Blessed House" || Epoch 47.1 (1998)

| "Mrs. Sen's" || Salamander 6.1 (Summer 1999)

| "The Third and Final Continent" || The New Yorker (June 21, 1999)

| "Nobody's Business" || The New Yorker (March 12, 2001) || Unaccustomed Earth

| "Gogol" || The New Yorker (June 16, 2003) || from The Namesake

| "Hell-Heaven" || The New Yorker (May 24, 2004) || rowspan=8| Unaccustomed Earth

| "Once in a Lifetime" || The New Yorker (May 8, 2006)

| "Year's End" || The New Yorker (December 24, 2007)

| "Unaccustomed Earth" || rowspan=5| Unaccustomed Earth (2008)

| "A Choice of Accommodations"

| "Only Goodness"

| "Going Ashore"

| "Hema and Kaushik"

| "Brotherly Love" || The New Yorker (June 10, 2013) || from The Lowland

| "Il confine" ("The Boundary") || Granta Italia (2015) The New Yorker (January 29, 2018) || rowspan=4| Racconti romani Roman Stories

| "La riunione" ("The Reentry") || La Lettura (2018)

| "Le feste di P." ("P's Parties") || Nuovi Argomenti 4 (May 2019) The New Yorker (July 10, 2023)

| "Il ritiro" ("The Delivery") || Nuovi Argomenti 5 (September 2020) A Public Space 29 (January 2021)

| "Casting Shadows" || The New Yorker (February 15, 2021) || from Whereabouts

| "Casa luminosa" ("Well-Lit House") || Nuovo Decameron (2021) || rowspan=5| Racconti romani Roman Stories

| "I biglettini" ("Notes") || Le ferite: quattordici grandi racconti per i 50 anni de Medici Senza Frontiere (2021)

| "La scalinata" ("The Steps") || rowspan=3| Racconti romani (2022) Roman Stories (2023)

| "La processione" ("The Procession")

| "Dante Alighieri"

| "Jubilee" || The New Yorker (July 7 & 14, 2025) || -

Poetry

;Collections

Il quaderno di Nerina (Italian) (2020)

<!--;Chapbooks

;Anthologies (edited)

;List of poems

{|class='wikitable sortable'

!width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

|Title

|Year

|First published

|Collected in

|}-->

Nonfiction

Books

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

Essays, reporting and other contributions

The Magic Barrel (introduction) by Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2003.
"Cooking Lessons: The Long Way Home" (September 6, 2004, The New Yorker)
Malgudi Days (introduction) by R. K. Narayan, Penguin Classics, 2006.
"Rhode Island" in State by State edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, Ecco, September 16, 2008
"Improvisations: Rice" (November 23, 2009, The New Yorker)
"Reflections: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship" (June 13, 2011, The New Yorker)
The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych edited by Daniel Slager, Milkweed Editions, June 14, 2011.

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

———————

;Bibliography notes

References

External links

Jhumpa Lahiri: A Bibliography, First Editions
Jhumpa Lahiri - Critical Biography