An Evening with Jhumpa Lahiri & Zahid Chaudhary

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and translator Jhumpa Lahiri returns to Princeton— where until recently she served as a professor of creative writing  — for an evening of discussion of her newest collection of short stories, which she wrote in Italian and then co-translated into English; about her life’s work; and about the power of translation.

At 45, Italian became her new adoptive language. “Nothing came to me naturally;” she wrote, “I had to pay my dues.” McCarter Theater, Labyrinth Books, and the Princeton Public Library invite Jhumpa Lahiri to explore her life and art with her former colleague at Princeton and with the audie

In Roman Stories, Lahiri’s first story collection since the #1 NYTimes beststelling Unaccustomed Earth, Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting. These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowit

Currently Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. Zahid R. Chaudhary teaches British and Postcolonial literature in the English Department at Princeton University and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of Afterimage of Empire: 19th Century Photography in India. His forthcoming book is Unruly Truth: Psychopolitics and the Crises of Authority.

Please note: this is a ticketed event. The price of the ticket includes a copy of Lahiri’s Roman Stories. Ticket information is here.

This event is co-presented by Labyrinth, McCarter Theatre, and the Princeton Public Library and is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council.