Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri (born 11 July 1967 in London) is a British-American author of Bengali Indian heritage whose debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, she moved with her family to Massachusetts at the age of three and grew up in Rhode Island. She took a BA in English at Barnard College in 1989 and then several graduate degrees at Boston University, including an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in Renaissance studies.

Interpreter of Maladies, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999, gathers stories of Indian and Indian-American lives and has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Her first novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, September 2003), follows a Bengali-American son nicknamed after Nikolai Gogol and was filmed by Mira Nair. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and The Lowland (2013) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. After moving to Rome in 2012 she began writing in Italian: the memoir In altre parole (2015) and the novel Dove mi trovo (2018), which she translated herself as Whereabouts (2021), followed by Racconti romani (2022), published in English as Roman Stories (2023). She received the National Humanities Medal in 2014.

For collectors

The key first is the 1999 Houghton Mifflin edition of Interpreter of Maladies, her Pulitzer-winning debut, followed by the 2003 Houghton Mifflin first of The Namesake. Her Italian originals, published in Italy before their English versions, form a distinct strand of her bibliography.