Jhumpa Lahiri

By Zac and Annalise

CHildhood To

Adulthood

Born in london in 1967

Experiences and Heros

Why?

She started writing as a child, "in bits and pieces. I didn't enter into it properly until my early twenties. After I left college and found myself out in the world something started to shift in me... a slow, hesitant artistic awakening. It was a secret, scary thing."

Awards

The New Yorker has published three of her stories and named her as 'one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40.'  The greatest tribute to her talent thus far has been the award for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  She is the first Indian woman to receive this award.

QUOTES?!?

“[Readers] can read their family stories into her family stories,” says Lahiri’s editor at Knopf, Robin Desser, who took her on in a two-book deal worth at least $1 million. “It’s emotionally based storytelling that unfolds in a many-layered way, but without tricks.” She even compares it, a bit breathlessly, to Tolstoy: “When you read a paragraph of Natasha putting on her shoes, you know exactly who she is. I feel that way about reading Jhumpa Lahiri.”

“The real event just sort of caught my character in there,” she says. “I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t like to read about something—an event, a cataclysm—in fiction for the sake of reading it. I will want to read [Lawrence Wright’s] The Looming Tower, because it will help me understand what happened on September 11. I mean, that’s what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a major global event in this book—I don’t know if it was okay or not.”

“I’m the least experimental writer,” she says. “The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me.”

 

Work Cited

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/jhumpalahiri/bio.php

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1738511,00.html

http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lahiri.html

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/authorprofiles/p/lahiri.htm

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Jhumpa_Lahiri

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