Jhumpa Lahiri's very first book, "The Interpreter of Maladies," was a collection of short stories. It won the Pulizer Prize for fiction in 2000. Three years later, she published her first novel, "The Namesake," and cemented her place in book lovers' hearts. The novel is about an immigrant family who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Kolkata, the Bengali city in India formerly known as Calcutta. Lahiri's novel instantly connects with so many Americans who have lived in two worlds, as first generation immigrant families often feel.
Lahiri's voice is so unique and moving, but when it comes to language(s) she described feeling that growing up as a child of Indian immigrants, both Bengali and English were foreign languages. She later studied and learned Italian and wrote another book, this time in Italian. It is titled "In Oltre Parole," and that translates to "In Other Words."
Lahiri describes her writing and her love of Italian in a clip from NJ PBS' show State of the Arts.
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