37 Facts About Jhumpa Lahiri

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born on July 11,1967 and is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

On January 22,2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland.

In 2012, Jhumpa 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.

Jhumpa Lahiri compiled, edited, and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers.

Jhumpa Lahiri has translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.

Jhumpa Lahiri was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022.

Jhumpa Lahiri's mother was an avid reader of Bengali literature and occasionally wrote Bengali poems.

Jhumpa Lahiri recalled that her maternal grandfather, a visual artist who passed away when she was six, would invent stories to tell her.

Jhumpa Lahiri can speak and understand the Bengali language fluently, but is not a fluent reader.

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.

Jhumpa Lahiri decided in college that she wanted to be an English professor.

Jhumpa Lahiri worked at a bookstore with responsibilities that included opening shipments and operating a cash register.

Jhumpa Lahiri friended with a fellow bookstore employee whose father, Bill Corbett, was a poet.

Jhumpa Lahiri frequently visited the Corbett family home, which was "filled with books and art", and spent an entire summer living in the Corbett home.

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote a few sketches and fragments on a typewriter whenever she was alone.

Jhumpa Lahiri even bought a copy of Writer's Market and submitted stories to small literary magazines, but faced multiple rejections.

Jhumpa Lahiri enrolled in Boston University to pursue Master's of English literature.

Jhumpa Lahiri's dissertation, completed in 1997, was titled Accursed Palace: The Italian Palazzo on the Jacobean Stage.

Jhumpa Lahiri took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years.

Jhumpa Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

In 2001, Jhumpa Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then deputy editor of TIME Latin America, and who is its senior editor.

On July 1,2015, Jhumpa Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty as a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts.

In December 2015, Jhumpa Lahiri published a non-fiction essay called "Teach Yourself Italian" in The New Yorker about her experience learning Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri was 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 the Limca Book of Records.

In 2018, Jhumpa Lahiri published her first novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo.

Jhumpa Lahiri later translated Dove mi trovo into English; the translation, Whereabouts, was published in 2021.

In 2022, Jhumpa Lahiri published a new short story collection under the title Racconti Romani, the title being a nod to a book by Alberto Moravia of the same name.

Jhumpa 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.

Jhumpa 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.

Jhumpa Lahiri's 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 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 Jhumpa Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of development.

When Jhumpa Lahiri began "writing seriously", she studied stories by James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf to understand narrative structure and character development.

Jhumpa Lahiri is "eternally indebted" to William Trevor and Mavis Gallant.

Jhumpa Lahiri cited short story writers Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor and Mavis Gallant.

Jhumpa Lahiri worked on the third season of the HBO television program In Treatment.

In September 2024, Jhumpa 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.

In October 2024, Jhumpa Lahiri signed an open letter alongside several thousand authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.