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]
In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy 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]
Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal. 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] 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.[9] Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).[10]
When Lahiri began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, her teacher decided to call her by her familiar name Jhumpa because it was easier to pronounce than her more formal given names.[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."[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.[12]
Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1989.[13]
Lahiri then 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).[14] 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[15][16] with her husband and their two children, Octavio (born 2002) and Noor (b. 2005).[11]
On July 1, 2015, Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.[17]
Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years".[18] 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."[19] 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."[20]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][21]
In 2003, Lahiri published her first novel, The Namesake.[20] The theme and plot of this story was 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 of 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.[22] 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.[23]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."[23]
In December 2015, Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called "Teach Yourself Italian" in The New Yorker about her experience learning Italian.[28] 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.[29]
Lahiri was in 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 Limca Book of Records.[30]
In 2017, Lahiri received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.[31]
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 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.
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.[32][19]
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 in order 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.[33]
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.[34]
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.[35][36] In October 2024, Lahiri signed an open letter alongside several thousand authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.[37][38]
Awards
1993 – TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation
1999 – O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies"
1999 – PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies"
1999 – "Interpreter of Maladies" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
2009 – Premio Gregor von Rezzori for foreign fiction translated into Italian for "Unaccustomed Earth" ("Una nuova terra"), translated by Federica Oddera (Guanda)
2023 – Honorary Doctorate from The American University of Rome in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to literature in English and Italian.[41]
The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych edited by Daniel Slager, Milkweed Editions, June 14, 2011.
"Teach yourself Italian". Personal History. The New Yorker. 91 (39). Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein: 30–36. December 7, 2015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: others (link)[a]
^Shattuck, Kathryn (November 11, 2010). "Therapy? Not His Cup of Tea". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 23, 2017. Retrieved February 25, 2017.
Cussen, John. “the william morris in jhumpa lahiri’s wallpaper / and other of the writer’s reproofs to literary scholarship,” JEAL: Journal of Ethnic American Literature 2 (2012): 5-72.
Das, Subrata Kumar. "Bengali Diasporic Culture: A Study of the Film Adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake". The Criterion: An International Journal in English (ISSN 0976-8165) 4 (II), April 2013: np.
Mitra, Zinia. "Echoes of Loneliness: Dislocation and Human Relationships in Jhumpa Lahiri", Contemporary Indian Women Writers in English: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Nizara Hazarika, K.M. Johnson and Gunjan Dey.Pencraft International.(ISBN978-93-82178-12-5), 2015.
Mitra, Zinia . " An Interpretation of Interpreter of Maladies", Jhumpa Lahiri : Critical Perspectives. Ed. Nigamananda Das. Pencraft International, 2008.(ISBN81-85753-87-3) pp 95–104.
Roy, Pinaki. "Postmodern Diasporic Sensibility: Rereading Jhumpa Lahiri's Oeuvre". Indian English Fiction: Postmodern Literary Sensibility. Ed. Bite, V. New Delhi: Authors Press, 2012 (ISBN978-81-7273-677-4). pp. 90–109.
Roy, Pinaki. "Reading The Lowland: Its Highs and its Lows". Labyrinth (ISSN 0976-0814) 5(3), July 2014: 153–62.
Palmerino, Gregory, “The Immigrant and the Child at Home: Chiasmus as a Narrative Technique in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s””, Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 75 | Autumn 2020, Online since 1 December 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3394
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