Lahiri, Jhumpa << luh HIHR ee, JUM pah >> (1967-…), is an American author who writes about her family heritage in India and the experiences of immigrant Indians adjusting to life in the United States. Much of her fiction deals with the strain between educated middle-class Indian professionals and their American-born children.
Lahiri was born in London to parents from the state of West Bengal in India. She grew up in Rhode Island, where her parents settled when she was 3 years old. She also made extended visits to members of her family in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. Her exposure to both Indian and American culture has shaped her writing.
Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her first published book, a collection of short stories called Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Her next published work was her first novel, The Namesake (2003). The central character is Gogol Ganguli, a young man named after Nikolai Gogol, his father’s favorite writer. Gogol feels like an outsider torn between two cultures, his parents’ homeland in India and the United States, where he was born. He resists many of his parents’ values as he tries to establish his own identity.
The novel was followed by Lahiri’s second short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). The stories sustain her fascination with American-born children of Indian parents. Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland (2013), is a family chronicle set in both India and the United States, centering on the contrasting lives of two Indian brothers. In In Other Words (2016), her first nonfiction book, Lahiri describes her love of the Italian language and her attempts to master it. She wrote Whereabouts (2021), a novel about a woman’s daily life and her inner life, first in Italian and then translated it into English. Translating Myself and Others (2022) is a collection of essays. Roman Stories (2023), a collection of short stories about foreigners living in Rome, Italy, was also written in Italian. Six of its nine stories were translated into English by Lahiri and the other three by Todd Portnowitz.
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born on July 11, 1967. She acquired the name “Jhumpa” as a child in the Bengali tradition of families giving children pet names. She has said that the name has no particular meaning. Lahiri received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She also earned three master’s degrees from Boston University—in English, creative writing, and comparative literature—plus a doctorate in Renaissance studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and at the Rhode Island School of Design.
