I hear the girls’ voices as they run across the lawn, I learn their names. I do the housework and water the garden, but I can’t help noticing how happy and excited they are. I pretend not to watch them, to be discreet. There were lots of tomatoes this year, but most of them spoiled in the July rain. Guests are free to pick lettuce and tomatoes, I add. I explain how to get to the supermarket, how to use the washing machine behind the house, and where to hang the laundry, just on the other side of my father’s garden. Kill the flies before going to bed, I suggest, otherwise they start buzzing at dawn and become a nuisance. Her debut collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies”, won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award.I show her where the mouse poison is hidden.

She is the author of three previous books.

Lahiri’s most ambitious undertaking yet”, that “eventually opens out into a moving family story”. “The premise of her new novel, ‘The Lowland,’ in contrast, is startlingly operatic,” the influential US daily said calling it “certainly Ms.

In a review of her latest novel, the New York Times noted: “Jhumpa Lahiri first made her name with quiet, meticulously observed stories about Indian immigrants trying to adjust to new lives in the United States, stories that had the hushed intimacy of chamber music.” London-born daughter of immigrants from West Bengal, 46-year-old Lahiri, who lives in New York’s Brooklyn last month lost out on the prestigious Man Booker Prize for contemporary fiction writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. The young people’s literature award was won by Cynthia Kadohata for “The Thing About Luck.” The poetry award went to Mary Szybist for “Incarnadine”. The nonfiction award was won by George Packer for “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America”. The annual awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, honour American authors for published works over the past year in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. McBride, 56, who said he hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech because he didn’t expect to win against the likes of Pynchon, Lahiri and Saunders, said, “They are fine writers. Other fiction finalists were Rachel Kushner for “The Flamethrowers“ Thomas Pynchon for “Bleeding Edge“ and George Saunders for “Tenth of December”.Īt Wednesday’s award giving ceremony in New York, the judges praised McBride for “a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain.” McBride’s “The Good Lord Bird”, about the journey of a young slave in the 1850s scored over Lahiri’s tale of two brothers set in Kolkata of the 1960s. Pulitzer Prize winning Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, “The Lowland” failed to win the 2013 US National Book Award in fiction losing out to author James McBride.

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