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How to pronounce Jhumpa Lahiri: JHOOM-paah L-hee-ree
Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College (Columbia University). She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as Racconti Italiani. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English is a collection of essays entitled Translating Myself and Others, published in Spring 2022 by Princeton University Press.
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In your first book, Interpreter of Maladies, some of the stories are
set in India, others in the United States. The Namesake is set predominantly in
the United States. Can you talk a bit about the significance of setting in your
work?
When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts were, for some
reason, always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well as a result of
repeated visits with my family, sometimes for several months at a time. These
trips, to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New
England town where I was raised, shaped my perceptions of the world and of
people from a very early age. I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor as a
former resident -- a valuable position, I think, for a writer.
The reason my
first stories were set in Calcutta is due partly to that perspective -- that
necessary combination of distance and intimacy with a place. Eventually I
started to set my stories in America, and as a result the majority of stories in
Interpreter of Maladies have an American setting. Still, though I've never lived
anywhere but America, India continues to form part of my fictional landscape. As
most of my characters have an Indian background, India ...
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