Namesake (Lahiri) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—London, England
• Reared—Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D., Boston
  University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; PEN/Hemingway Award; American
  Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award
• Currently—New York, New York

Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son. (From the publisher.)

More
Jhumpa Lahiri has spent most of her life traveling between countries and cultures. Born in London and raised in Rhode Island, she visited Calcutta regularly with her family, often for months at a time. Neither a tourist nor a native, her ties to India are as strong as her ties to the U.S. This, plus her experience growing up as a child of immigrants, permeates her characters, settings and themes.

A serious and studious child, Lahiri excelled at school. As a child, she wrote in endless notebooks as well as for her school newspaper, but had stopped writing fiction by the time she went to college. She didn't start writing fiction seriously until after receiving her Bachelor's degree, and even though she went on to earn three Master's degrees and a PhD, academics was not her calling. She published a few stories, and was eventually accepted to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which put her on the road to finding an agent, publishing stories in The New Yorker and selling her first book, Interpreter of Maladies.

When Interpreter of Maladies hit the bookshelves in 1999, readers and critics fell deeply in love with Lahiri's raw but gentle prose and fully-realized characters. Three of the short stories had already appeared in The New Yorker in 1998, but the nine stories presented as a whole has been considered nothing less than a masterpiece. Interpreter of Maladies is a showcase of Lahiri's flexibility as a writer; stories are written in first and third person, and from the point of view of both men and women. Navigating the emotional terrain between two cultures — Indian and American — stories are set in both countries, although India is often a figurative setting in the memory of her characters, regardless of where they reside. Still, the circumstances presented in the stories — infidelity, civil war or the oddness of Halloween to a first-generation American — transcends ethnicity in her capable hands. In 2000, Lahiri was recognized as an important new talent with the most precious of literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — something rare for a collection of short stories and even more esteemed for a debut work of fiction.

Lahiri continues to explore the themes of divided identity and loyalty with her first novel, The Namesake (2003), the story of Gogol, a first-generation Bengali-American boy, and his family. Written from the male point of view, Lahiri uses the structure of the novel to give her characters room to expand, for settings to sink in and nuances to play out to their fullest. The novel is set in the United States, which nicely mirrors the many cultural and generational changes in both the setting and characters, but Calcutta is always present in the background. With utter tenderness, Lahiri allows Gogol and his family to search out their identities across the continents, reconciling belonging and estrangement from the place they call home.

By creating characters and settings that are in a constant flux, Lahiri is able to cut to the meat of life's most prescient questions. At the core of Lahiri's fiction is a passion for exploring the gray areas; a space she deftly brings into focus with seamlessly crafted plots and three-dimensional characters, drawing readers back time and time again.

Extras
• Like the rest of her family, Lahiri has a (private) "pet name" and a (public) "good name." When she started school, her teachers decided that Jhumpa, her pet name, was the easier one to pronounce, and she has been called that in public ever since, something many of her relatives find odd.

• A major turning point for Lahiri's writing career came when she was accepted into the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

• Lahiri is married to journalist Alberto Vourvoulias, a Guatemalan of Greek ancestry. Their son, Octavio, is learning to speak English, Bengali, and Spanish.  (From Barnes & Noble.)