Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri will speak at McCarter Theatre on Wednesday, October 14 at 4:30 p.m. Lahiri will be joined by Mary Szybist. The event is presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts Program in Creative Writing and is free and open to the public.

Lahiri joined the Princeton University faculty in September 2015. She has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing and will teach workshops in fiction and translation.

Lahiri’s debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her most recent novel, The Lowland, published in 2013, was short-listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Her first novel The Namesake (2003) was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications, and was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Lahiri’s second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her work has also appeared frequently in The New Yorker and has been translated into over 30 languages.

Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Although they have lived in the United States for more than thirty years, Lahiri observes that her parents retain “a sense of emotional exile” and Lahiri herself grew up with “conflicting expectations…to be Indian by Indians and American by Americans.” Lahiri’s abilities to convey the oldest cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience.

Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story “Interpreter of Maladies”), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006.

For more information, visit www.arts.princeton.edu.