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Jhumpa Lahiri, 48, author of several award-winning books, has been awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal, a rare honor bestowed on leading literati and artistes in the country. She will be among several National Medal of Arts and National Humanities recipients to be recognized at a White House ceremony Sept. 10.
The individuals and organizations getting the awards are selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities which were established by the Congress in 1965 as independent agencies of the Federal Government. President Obama chose Lahiri’s book, The Lowlands, published in 2013, as his Summer reading this year. He also appointed her to the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities in 2010.
Some of the others being recognized at the ceremony include author Stephen King who is among the National Medal of the Arts recipients, and popular writers Alice Waters, Annie Dillard, and Larry McMurtry, all 2014 National Humanities Medal winners.
The citation which will be read out at the White House ceremony says Lahiri is being recognized for “enlarging the human story.”
“Dr. Lahiri has illuminated the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging,” the citation adds.
Lahiri won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 2000, for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. She also received the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year for the same book. Her next novel, The Namesake, which like most of her work, relates the immigrant experience, was made into a popular film of the same name.
Her novel The Namesake 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. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Born with the first names Nilanjana Sudeshna, Lahiri chooses to use her nickname Jhumpa.
She was two years old when her parents moved from London to Rhode Island where she was brought up. Lahiri lives in Brooklyn, New York and Rome, Italy. She is married to journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and the couple has two children, Octavio and Noor.
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