Jhumpa Lahiri

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. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her novel The Namesake, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, was adapted into a motion picture directed by Mira Nair. Her other books include Unaccustomed Earth, winner of the Frank O'Connor Prize, The Lowland, finalist for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and Translating Myself and Others, finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. In Italian, she is the author of 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 (partially self-translated as Roman Stories). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella.