Jhumpa Lahiri

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Image:Lahiri.jpg Jhumpa Lahiri (b.1967) (Nilanjana Sudeshna) is a contemporary Indian American author based in New York City.

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Biography

Ms. Lahiri attended Barnard College, graduating in 1989 with a major in English Literature and later attended Boston University, earning Master's Degrees in both Creative Writing and Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, as well as a PhD in Renaissance Studies. She also worked a short time teaching creative writing at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design. She was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection of nine short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans and the nuances of their lives. Her second book and first novel, The Namesake, was published in 2003.

Currently, Ms. Lahiri lives and works in Brooklyn with her Guatemalan-American husband Alberto and their son Octavio and daughter Noor. An anecdote published in USA Today mentions a schoolteacher who found her given name too long and used her nickname Jhumpa instead. Ms. Lahiri adapted this incident in her book The Namesake.

Ms. Lahiri's book, The Namesake, is being turned into the film, The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair, with a screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala. The film casts Tabu, Irfan Khan and Kal Penn and will be released sometime in 2006.

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