Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiriis an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladieswon the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake, was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nicknameJhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 July 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.
At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.
There's obviously a message, or a moral, or something. I think that's good - but it's not something I actively think about, to be honest with you.
Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.
It's hard for me to talk about anything I'm doing at the moment. It's only after I finish something that I can actually describe it in words.