A tale of two women

Jhumpa Lahiri

Year 2000 Pulitzer prize winner for The Interpreter of Maladies, and author of The Namesake. Her writing style is crisp, simple and full of anecdotes. It is amazing to note how she has captured all those small details in life that we so enjoy but tend to forget eventually. Her stories have as much beauty and softness about them as you might have felt when you watched the film Amélie [Link]. No Bengali worth his salt would forego her stories!

Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies.

She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

Mira Nair

It will be worthwhile to expect Mira Nair to do a truly wonderful job when she turns The Namesake [Link] into a film this year. She's known to have captured the essence of the stories with her screen play. Be it Monsoon Wedding or Missippi Masaala, Mira has treated her subject with due understanding and sensitivity. It will be a demanding role for lead role Kal Penn after the tongue and cheek, American style humour in Harold and Kumar. Here's Mira Nair reading an excerpt from The Blessed House (short story from The Interpreter of Maladies) on WBEZ's This American Life [Audio Link].

Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneswar, India in 1957. Educated at both Delhi University and Harvard University, Nair began her artistic career as an actor before turning her attention to film. She found incipient success as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards for So Far From India and India Cabaret. In 1988, Nair’s debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival as well as 25 other international awards. Read more ...