Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis. Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005. In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998).

She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Nilanjana Sudeshna 'Jhumpa' Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Elegant, subtle and moving, ‘The Namesake’ is for everyone who loved the clarity, sympathy and grace of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut story collection, ‘Interpreter of Maladies’. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, Jhumpa Lahiri's much-anticipated first novel is a triumph of humane story-telling. And so he sets off on his own path through life, a path strewn with conflicting loyalties, love and loss… In a panic, his father decides to nickname him 'Gogol' – after his favourite writer.īrought up as an Indian in suburban America, Gogol Ganguli soon finds himself itching to cast off his awkward name, just as he longs to leave behind the inherited values of his Bengali parents.

But as time passes and still no letter arrives from India, American bureaucracy takes over and demands that 'baby boy Ganguli' be given a name. And so Ashima and Ashoke have agreed to put off the decision of what to name the baby until a letter comes…'įor now, the label on his hospital cot reads simply BABY BOY GANGULI. 'When her grandmother learned of Ashima's pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at the prospect of naming the family's first sahib. ‘The Namesake’ is the story of a boy brought up Indian in America.

The namesake a novel by jhumpa lahiri