Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri was born in London to Bengali immigrant parents and raised in Rhode Island, where her father worked as a university librarian; she studied literature at Barnard and collected multiple graduate degrees from Boston University, including a doctorate in Renaissance studies, before turning to fiction. Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, an unusually rare honor for a first book of stories.

The Namesake, her first novel, was adapted into a well-received film by Mira Nair; she continued mining the Bengali-American immigrant experience across two more books before an unexpected reinvention: she moved to Rome, taught herself to write in Italian, and began publishing fiction and essays directly in that language, an act of self-imposed exile from her own famous English style.

She has since translated her own Italian work into English and continues to write and teach in both languages.