Lahiri's debut short story collection wins Pulitzer

By Eric McHenry

Author Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS'93, UNI'95,'97) capped a year of successes with the most prestigious American writing prize, the Pulitzer. Lahiri was honored for her first book, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner).

In winning the prize, announced April 10 at Columbia University, she also put the capstone on what has been a remarkable year for recent graduates of the Creative Writing Program. Lahiri and Ha Jin (GRS'94) all but swept the major national awards for books of fiction published in 1999. The night before she was named the Pulitzer winner, Lahiri was in Boston picking up the esteemed PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. And in February she took home Best Debut from the first annual New Yorker Book Awards. Ha Jin captured the 1999 National Book Award with his novel Waiting (Pantheon), and earlier this month won the $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award. He was also one of the two other Pulitzer finalists.

Jhumpa Lahiri Photo by Jerry Bauer

For Lahiri, winning the fiction Pulitzer is a singular achievement. At 32, she is among the youngest writers ever to do so. Moreover, her winning work is a short story collection, not a novel. And it is her first effort.

"What that says about the quality of the writing is self-evident," says novelist Askold Melnyczuk. "It's urbane, generous, grounded, wry, sophisticated, and earnest all at once."

The nine stories in Interpreter of Maladies, set both in India and the United States, present people challenged by the need to straddle two or more cultures. Like Lahiri herself, who grew up in Rhode Island but spent much of her childhood in her parents' native India, the characters work to assemble a sense of home from the jagged-bordered pieces they've been given.

"Jhumpa has an unlikely combination of fluencies," says Melnyczuk, a CAS preceptor of English and the founding editor of Agni, the BU-sponsored literary journal in which the short story "Interpreter of Maladies" first appeared. "She moves seamlessly through an American and an Indian landscape, with an acute eye for the multiple identities that we all bear these days."

Along with the Pulitzer, the PEN/Hemingway, and the New Yorker award, Interpreter of Maladies was recognized as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1999. After its appearance in Agni, the collection's title story was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1999 (Houghton Mifflin) and Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards (Anchor Books), and received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. In its July 21 and 28, 1999, double issue, the New Yorker identified Lahiri and 19 other young writers as "The Future of American Fiction."