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British-American author (born 1967)
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri[1] (born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.[2]
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.[3] Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013)[4] 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.[5] 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.[6][7]
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal.[6] She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022.[7] 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.[8]
Early and personal life[edit]Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants Amar Lahiri and Tapati "Tia" Lahiri (née Sanyal) from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her father hailed from Tollygunge.[9] Her mother hailed from North Kolkata.[10] According to Lahiri, she acquired an Indian passport and "was appended to my mother’s passport. Then I became a naturalised US citizen. Then I got my UK passport because I was born in London, and so in my life I have actually possessed three passports."[9] 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] She has a sister born in the US in November 1974.[11]
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.[12] Lahiri's mother, Tia, a schoolteacher,[13] wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).[14] Her mother was an avid reader of Bengali literature and occasionally wrote Bengali poems.[11] Lahiri recalled that her maternal grandfather, a visual artist who passed away when she was six, would invent stories to tell her.[11] She can speak and understand the Bengali language fluently, but is not a fluent reader. 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.[15]
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.[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."[16] That was the time when she quickly acquired the English language, "but her parents, especially her mother, never liked her speaking it."[15] 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 never showed her writing to any adults.[17] 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."[17][11]
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."[17] 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.[11] She practised music and performed in plays. With the aspiration to be a journalist, she "worked with words" and wrote articles and essays.[11]
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 another. 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.[18]
Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989.[19] 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.[11]
Lahiri then moved to Boston to pursue a Ph.D., and lived in a rented room within a household of non-relatives. She worked at a bookstore with responsibilities that included opening shipments and operating a cash register.[11] She friended with a fellow bookstore employee whose father, Bill Corbett, was a poet.[11] She frequently visited the Corbett family home, which was "filled with books and art", and spent an entire summer living in the Corbett home. She wrote a few sketches and fragments on a typewriter whenever she was alone.[11]
Soon, she secretly aspired again to be a writer. She shared her writings with a person who motivated her "to sit down and produce something." On weekends and at night, she typed stories onto a computer in the office where she worked as a research assistant. She even bought a copy of Writer's Market and submitted stories to small literary magazines, but faced multiple rejections.[11] She enrolled in Boston University to pursue Master's of English literature. One day, she audaciously requested to sit in on a creative-writing class open only to writing students. Leslie Epstein, the director of the creative writing program at Boston University, made an exception, which led to her formally applying to the programme the next year with a fellowship. Her parents were neutral about the decision.[11] At the age of 30, she wrote "A Temporary Matter", her first short story written as an adult, which later became included in her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.[11]
She 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).[20] 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.[citation needed]
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[21][22] with her husband and their two children, Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005).[16]
On July 1, 2015, Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.[23]
Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years".[24] 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."[25] 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."[26] 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).[1][27]
In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake.[26] 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.[28] 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.[29] 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."[29]
In February 2010, she was appointed a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others.[30]
Lahiri in 2013In September 2013, her novel The Lowland was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize,[31][32] 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.[33] However, on November 20, 2013, it lost out for that award to James McBride and his novel The Good Lord Bird.[33]
In December 2015, Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called "Teach Yourself Italian" in The New Yorker about her experience learning Italian.[34] 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.[35]
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.[36]
In 2017, Lahiri received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.[37]
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.
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.[38][25] 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.[39]
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.[40] She also cites Dante and Horace as influences.[41] She also cited short story writers Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor and Mavis Gallant.[9]
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.[42]
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.[43][44] In October 2024, Lahiri signed an open letter alongside several thousand authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.[45][46]
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