Words collide

A powerful new novel begins a fresh chapter in novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s now bilingual career, says Olivia Marks

- Olivia Marks

In the year 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri was “hit by lightning”. At least, that is how she describes winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, aged 33, for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter Of Maladies (recently reprinted for its 20th anniversary, it has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide). Overnight, Lahiri became a rare kind of literary celebrity—when she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, then deputy editor of Time Latin America, in Kolkata the following year, “photographers climbed on to scaffolding” to take pictures of the glamorous Indian-American author.

Now 53, in person—or rather, on-screen—Lahiri is as considered and unhurried as the books that followed, each one critically acclaimed. From her volume lined office at Princeton University, where a blizzard rages outside, she presents herself as the quintessential professor of creative writing, as direct and warm as the pared-back stories of domestic life she has made her name with.

Her debut novel, The Namesake, came three years after that “bewildering” Pulitzer win, and was adapted into a Hollywood film; her follow-up short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, won the Frank O’Connor award (there was no shortlist— no other book was deemed worth considering), while her 2013 novel The Lowland was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Not long after, President Obama presented Lahiri with the 2014 National Humanities Medal. “Oh yeah,” she smiles modestly, “that was nice.”

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (Penguin Random House India) is out now

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