Almanac of Story Tellers: Jhumpa Lahiri

   Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of July 11th

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    It is the 192nd day of the year, leaving 173 days remaining in 2022.

 

    On this date in 1967, the Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri was born.

    She tells her stories of South Asian immigrants and their experiences in the United States in short stories and novels. More recently, she has been writing her stories in Italian, rather than English, to immerse herself in a third culture.

    Truly, it might be considered her fourth culture, because she was born in London before she and her parents came to the United States when she was a child.

    While she often wrote during her early years, she didn't consider herself a writer until after she completed her formal education -- with a bachelor's in English literature from Barnard College, and three master's (in English, creative writing, and comparative literature) and a doctorate in Renaissance studies from Boston University.

    In 1999, she published a compilation of her stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It was widely praised, winning several major literary awards, including the O. Henry Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

    She followed that up with a novel, The Namesake, which explores the conflicts in a Bengali family who immigrate to the United States. Her next novel, The Lowland, examines two Bengali brothers who take dramatically different paths in life. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in Britain and nominated for a National Book Award in the United States. It won the DCS Prize for South Asian Literature.

    After that, Lahiri learned Italian, and said she would start writing in that language. Her first piece was Teach Yourself Italian in The New Yorker. She wrote the article in Italian and translated it into English.

    She published her first novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo, in 2018. She also started translating Italian works into English. She and her husband moved to Rome for several years.

    The family currently lives in Brooklyn.