Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
How to pronounce Jhumpa Lahiri: JHOOM-paah L-hee-ree
Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.
The Namesake, published in September 2003, is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth was published in 2008 and became an immediate New York Times #1 bestseller.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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In your first book, Interpreter of Maladies, some of the stories are
set in India, others in the United States. The Namesake is set predominantly in
the United States. Can you talk a bit about the significance of setting in your
work?
When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts were, for some
reason, always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well as a result of
repeated visits with my family, sometimes for several months at a time. These
trips, to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New
England town where I was raised, shaped my perceptions of the world and of
people from a very early age. I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor as a
former resident -- a valuable position, I think, for a writer.
The reason my
first stories were set in Calcutta is due partly to that perspective -- that
necessary combination of distance and intimacy with a place. Eventually I
started to set my stories in America, and as a result the majority of stories in
Interpreter of Maladies have an American setting. Still, though I've never lived
anywhere but America, India continues to form part of my fictional landscape. As
most of my characters have an Indian background, India ...
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Aamina Ahmad, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Southern ... (more)
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