Lahiri, Jhumpa

(US, 1967– )

Born in London to Bengali parents, Lahiri was brought up in the United States where many of her stories are set; typically her fiction deals with the experience of first and second generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Her first book, The Interpreter of Maladies (2000) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and brought her rapidly to public notice. This collection of exquisitely crafted stories is by turns tender, funny, and melancholy, and the writing understated yet atmospheric. And most important of all, the characters that people it—whether wistful and nostalgic, damaged or broadly comic—simply glow with life.

Her first novel, The Namesake (2003) is about identity; Asian, American, familial, individual, written in spare and beautiful prose.

Amit Chaudhuri, Raymond Carver, Amy Tan  DHa/JR