Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (Bengali pronunciation: [d͡ʒʱumpa laːɦiɽi]; born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was made into a major motion picture. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.
In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome 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.
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali immigrants Amar Lahiri and Tapati "Tia" Lahiri (née Sanyal) from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her father hailed from Tollygunge. Her mother hailed from North Kolkata. Her father moved to London in 1966, followed by her mother in 1967. They lived in Finsbury Park. In 1969, her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was three. She has a sister, Simanti Lahiri, born in the United States in November 1974, who currently works for Rutgers University as a project coordinator.
Lahiri is both an American and a British citizen. According to Lahiri, she was an Indian citizen as she acquired an Indian passport and was appended to her mother’s passport. "It meant something to [her] mother emotionally," however, it "always seemed wrong" to her. She had to renounce her Indian citizenship when she became a naturalized American. It was only later that she received the British passport. Lahiri considers herself an "American" and has said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been."
After a year in Cambridge, her family moved to South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where Amar worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent", the story which concludes Interpreter of Maladies, is modeled after him. Tia, a schoolteacher, wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Her mother was an avid reader of Bengali literature and occasionally wrote Bengali poems. Lahiri recalled that her maternal grandfather, Phani Bhushan Sanyal, a visual artist who died when she was six, would invent stories to tell her. She can speak and understand the Bengali language fluently, but she cannot read it. It was the language she used to communicate with her parents, and she was "strictly forbidden" to speak any other language apart from Bengali until the age of four.
When Lahiri began kindergarten, her teachers called her Jhumpa, the name used at her home, because it was easier to pronounce than her more formal given name. Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." That was the time when she quickly acquired the English language, "but her parents, especially her mother, never liked her speaking it." She started to write as a child and would steal "one or two" extra notebooks from school closets, which marked her "first dishonest act", and would write fiction, mostly "stories about the victims of mean girls." She still prefers writing in notebooks. She never showed her writing to any adults. At the age of nine, she "self-published" her first book in 1976 The Life of a Weighing Scale (also titled The Adventures of a Weighing Scale), which she wrote from the perspective of a bathroom scale, for her school contest that she won and that "everyone had to write a book. The prize was that it got to be in the school library."
She loved acting in plays but was typically cast as the villain such as the Witch in "Hansel and Gretal", the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Fagin in Oliver Twist, as she thinks "that was partly because I wasn't blond and white, to cut to the chase." In her teenage years and beyond, the desire to construct stories were there but her "writing shrank in what seemed to be an inverse proportion to my years" due to her self-doubt and insecurity. She practised music and performed in plays. With the aspiration to be a journalist, she "worked with words" and wrote articles and essays.
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. 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, Indian and American, tugging away at one another. When she became an adult, she was able to be part of these two dimensions without the embarrassment and struggle that she had when she was a child. They 'intertwined' and, due to the now more prevalent use of the term, she refers to herself as 'Indian American'.
Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She decided in college that she wanted to be an English professor. The thought of being a writer was low as she wanted to be an ordinary person. She kept a few diaries in her childhood and adolescence, but she started seriously keeping diaries to this day from her twenties.
Lahiri then moved to Boston to pursue a PhD, and lived in a rented room within a household of non-relatives. She worked at a bookstore with responsibilities that included opening shipments and operating a cash register. She friended with a fellow bookstore employee whose father, Bill Corbett, was a poet. She frequently visited the Corbett family home, which was "filled with books and art", and spent an entire summer living in the Corbett home. She wrote a few sketches and fragments on a typewriter whenever she was alone.
In 1997, while Lahiri was completing her dissertation, she soon secretly aspired again to be a writer after feeling burned out on academia. That year, she also worked as an unpaid intern at Boston magazine, writing "flattering items about consumer products." She shared her writings with someone who motivated her to "sit down and produce something." On weekends and at night, she typed stories onto a computer in the office where she worked as a research assistant. She even bought a copy of Writer's Market and submitted stories to small literary magazines, but faced multiple rejections. She enrolled in Boston University to pursue Master's of English literature. One day, she audaciously requested to sit in on a creative-writing class open only to writing students. Leslie Epstein, the director of the creative writing program at Boston University, made an exception, which led her to formally apply to the programme the next year with a fellowship. Her parents were neutral about the decision. At the age of 30, she wrote "A Temporary Matter", her first short story written as an adult, which later became included in her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.