Jhumpa Lahiri (born Nilanjana Sudeshna in 1967) (Bengali: ঝুম্পা লাহিড়ী Jhumpa Lahiŗi) is a contemporary American writer author born in London, England and raised in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, of Indian descent. She currently lives in New York City.
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Background
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England in July 1967, and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Lahiri received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America. Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.
Career
Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis.
Interpreter of Maladies
As a collection of nine distinct short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri's debut, addresses sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants. The stories' themes include marital difficulties, miscarriages, and the disconnection between first and second generation immigrants in the United States. The stories are set in the northeastern United States, and in India, particularly Calcutta. It won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The Namesake
The Namesake, her second book and first novel, was published in 2003. The book spans more than thirty years in the life of a fictional family, the Gangulis. The parents, each born in Calcutta, immigrated to the United States as young adults. Their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up in the United States and much of the tension of the novel is dependent upon the generation and cultural gap between the parents and the children. One of the major themes of the book is Gogol's persistent ambivalence over his identity, by the fact that Gogol is the last name of a noted Russian author. Lahiri told a reporter from USA Today that this came from her own experience: While attending school in America, a schoolteacher found Lahiri's "good names" too hard to pronounce, and used her nickname Jhumpa instead.[1]
Film
- The film, The Namesake was released in March 2007 in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is directed by Mira Nair and a screenplay adapted from Lahiri's novel by Sooni Taraporevala. The film stars Kal Penn as the young protagonist Gogol, and features Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan. Lahiri herself is an extra in the film.
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
- 2000 - Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for "Interpreter of Maladies"
- 2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies
- 2000 - James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for "Indian Takeout" in Food & Wine Magazine
- 2002 - Guggenheim Fellowship
Bibliography
- 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
- 2003 The Namesake
- 2008 Unaccustomed Earth - [1]
Short Stories
- 2001 "Nobody's Business" (11 March 2001, The New Yorker) ("The Best American Short Stories 2002")
- 2004 "Hell-Heaven" (24 May 2004, The New Yorker) - full text
- 2006 "Once In A Lifetime" (1 May 2006, The New Yorker) - full text
- 2007 "Year's End" (24 December 2007, The New Yorker) - abstract
Miscellaneous books
- (Introduction) The Magic Barrel: Stories by Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2003.
- (Introduction) Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan, Penguin Classics, August 2006.
References
- Selvadurai, Shyam (ed.). "Jhumpa Lahiri: This Blessed House." Story-Wallah: A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005:391-410.
Notes
- ^ For Pulitzer winner Lahiri, a novel approach, USA Today
External links
Biographies:
Misc.:
