Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Lahiri beat out the more celebrated Annie Proulx (for Close Range: Wyoming Stories) and Ha Jin (Waiting) for the award, which carries a prize of a mere $5,000 but is worth a lot more in terms of recognition. The young writer is said to be working on a new novel and could not be reached for comment.

But the American literary circuit had already delivered its verdict last year. “In this accomplished collection of stories, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the lives of people on two continents — North America and India — and in doing so announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice. Indeed, Lahiri’s prose is so eloquent and assured that the reader easily forgets that Interpreter of Maladies is a young writer’s first book,” critic Michiko Kakutani, herself a Pulitzer winner, wrote in the paper when the book was released.

Typically, the award is given to “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Lahiri apparently made the cut although most of her stories speak to the Indian-Americans’ sense of displacement and loneliness and their struggle to come to terms with life — and marriage; most of her stories deal with relationships — in the United States.

In A Temporary Matter, which was first published last year in TheNew Yorker, a young Indian-American couple drift apart after the birth of a stillborn baby, “spending as much time on separate floors as possible.” During a week of power shutdowns in their neighbourhood, they embark on a parlour game — “telling each other something we’ve never told before” — to hurt and expose each other.

The title story Interpreter of Maladies focuses on a young, affluentAmerican couple who returns to India to trace their Indian heritage under the guidance of Mr Kapasi, their English-speaking Indian guide, and the frisson between the guide and the wife. Another story tells of the loneliness of an Indian faculty wife in the US who has taken a babysitting job to fill her empty afternoons. (“Here, in this place where Mr Sen has brought me,” she complains, “I cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence.”)

Lahiri’s spare and elegant style brought forth a shower of accolades from the American literary circuit with hardly a bad review. “She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics,” the NYT Book Review wrote on her debut.

The young writer has a master’s in creative writing at Boston University and a PhD in Rennaisance studies. She counts Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Franz Kafka among her favourite writers.

In an interview with the New York Newsday last year, she explained her penchant for writing about unhappily married Indian-American couples saying she viewed herself mostly as an “outsider.” Despite being surrounded by American food, clothing and friends, she never belonged and she was continually exhorted by her mother to identify herself as an Indian and never as American.

“But part of it is that I started writing these stories at a time when a lot of my friends were getting married. I was intensely curious about marriage, and I started to imagine what could go wrong. I do dwell, often morbidly, on worst-case scenarios,” she explained.

A New York resident, Lahiri travels often to India. She is a favourite at The New Yorker, the city’s celebrated magazine and has had three stories published in the magazine last year, including one in its summer fiction issue featuring 20 writers under the age of 40. She won the “best debut” at The New Yorker book awards.