Research Guides: Jhumpa Lahiri: Biography

Jhumpa Lahiri (Born July 11, 1967)

Named Nilanjana Sudeshana at birth, in her adult life, she has used the pet name “Jhumpa” that her school teachers preferred for its easier pronunciation. Lahiri was raised in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father was a librarian at the University of Rhode Island. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in English literature before earning three master’s degrees, one each in English, creative writing, and comparative studies in literature and the arts. She then received a PhD in Renaissance studies from Boston University with a dissertation on Italian architecture in Jacobean English drama. Continue . . .

Source: Dhingra, Lavina, and Maxwell Silverman. “Jhumpa Lahiri.” Critical Survey of American Literature, Dec. 2016, pp. 1698–1707. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

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Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies

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Resources

Being (and Feeling) Gogol: Reading and Recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" Article by Tamara Bhalla .
Interpreting a Culinary Montage: Food in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali American writer who rose to fame on being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first work of fiction, is well known for her generous use of culinary images in her fiction. She writes about Bengali Americans and the daily challenges they face in their lives. This paper intends to examine the relevance of food consumption and its significance at the personal level as well as the broader political level in Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). At the textual level, the paper shows that food acts as an aid to compensate for the understated narrative style of the author. Further, this paper underpins the fact that food not only acts as an identity marker but also negotiates personal, racial, sexual and social identities of the immigrant subjects.
American Spaces in the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri The article profiles author Jhumpa Lahiri. The Indian-American writer's collection of short stories "The Interpreter of Maladies" won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2000. He imagines an American world not just through American eyes, but also through the visions that gave other nation's culture, society and literature.
Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" as a Short Story Cycle Pedagody, Canon, Context: Toward a Redefinition of Ethnic American Literary Studies (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 451-464 (14 pages)
At Home with Jhumpa Lahiri Interview by The New Yorker.
Jhumpa Lahiri: In Other Words Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in her early 30s; since then, she wrote a novel that became a movie and won the National Humanities Medal. But the Bengali-American writer still felt that she was a linguistic orphan. Then she discovered Italian. Lahiri wrote her latest book in Italian, which she feels has given new life to her writing. "In Other Words" is now available in a bilingual edition.

From Films On Demand Database:

Jhumpa Lahiri: An Interview - Interpreter of Maladies An interview with Jhumpa Lahiri on April 12, 2000, shortly after she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of short stories, "Interpreter of Maladies", about the immigrant experience. Original broadcast date: April 12, 2000