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Jhumpa Lahiri

Biography

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College (Columbia University). She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, her debut story collection. She is also the author of THE NAMESAKE, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH and THE LOWLAND, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction.

Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays and poetry in Italian. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as RACCONTI ITALIANI. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Books by Jhumpa Lahiri

written by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by the author with Todd Portnowitz - Fiction, Short Stories, Women's Fiction

Rome is the protagonist, not the setting, of Jhumpa Lahiri's nine stories. In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering --- until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

by Jhumpa Lahiri - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrator, a woman questioning her place in the world, wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change.

written by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein - Memoir, Nonfiction

On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. A startling act of self-reflection, IN OTHER WORDS is Lahiri’s meditation on the process of learning to express herself in another language --- and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

by Jhumpa Lahiri - Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, “the covers become a part of me.”

by Jhumpa Lahiri - Fiction

Two brothers born in Calcutta during World War II share a close childhood but separate from one another as adults. Subhash, the older, quieter brother, moves to the US to study marine chemistry. Udayan, the younger and more volatile, stays in India and becomes active in the Naxalite Communist movement. The circumstances that draw them apart and eventually bring their families together form the drama of Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel.