Jhumpa Lahiri
1 book analyzed
Biography
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Bengali immigrant parents and grew up in Rhode Island. She holds degrees from Barnard and Boston University (including an MFA and multiple graduate degrees). Her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Namesake was her debut novel. She has described the book as drawing on her own experience as a second-generation Bengali-American — the embarrassment of her parents' culture, the guilt about that embarrassment, and the gradual understanding of what she was given. Later in her career she moved to Rome and began writing in Italian, a self-imposed linguistic exile that she documented in In Other Words (2015). Her own life is a version of the novel she wrote.