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After 20-plus years of writing a series of successful short story collections, including her 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Interpreter of Maladies, author Jhumpa Lahiri marks her return to the literary landscape with her first English novel in nearly a decade.
It was only in 2011 when she, along with her husband and children, moved to Rome that Lahiri was able to rekindle her relationship with the Italian lingua franca, which she had picked up during her postgraduate years, only to eventually find herself writing a novel in it. Five years later, in 2018,
once she felt she had come comfortably far in her linguistic journey, Lahiri went ahead and wrote Dove Mi Trovo, her first novella in Italian. Subsequently, she undertook the enormous task of translating her own work into English, with Whereabouts as her title of choice.
‘Whereabouts’: Jhumpa Lahiri is still asking what it means to belong, though not for immigrants
Lahiri translated her own Italian novel into English, and is not writing of the Indian diaspora in the USA.
In an interview in 2017, one year before she published
Dove mi trovo, her first novel in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri spoke about her metamorphosis as a writer. “I used to look for an identity that could be sharp, acceptable, mine. But now the idea of a precise identity seems a trap.”
Five years earlier, Lahiri had surprised readers and friends alike by moving to Rome, led by an overriding desire to immerse herself in Italy, and more specifically, its language. In 2015, she published her first book in Italian,