Jhumpa Lahiri author page

Jhumpa Lahiri biography

Jhumpa Lahiri is an American author and translator known for fiction exploring identity, migration and belonging. She was born in London to Bengali parents and moved to the United States as a child. She studied at Barnard College and earned multiple graduate degrees at Boston University, including a PhD in Renaissance Studies.

Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. It also received the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was later adapted into a feature film directed by Mira Nair in 2006.

Lahiri’s later works include the story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and the novel The Lowland (2013), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. From 2012 she began writing in Italian, producing the memoir In altre parole (2015) and the novel Dove mi trovo (2018). She has also translated Italian authors into English, including Domenico Starnone.

Her novel Whereabouts, translated by Lahiri from Italian, was published by Knopf in 2021. In 2023 she released Roman Stories, a short story collection written originally in Italian and translated with Todd Portnowitz.

Lahiri is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. Her honours include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2000) for Interpreter of Maladies.