Winner of 2000 Pulitzer prize in the category of fiction for 'Interpreter of Maladies' - collection of 9 short stories,  Jhumpa Lahiri was born to Bengali Indian parents in 1967 in London and grew up at Rhode Island, USA. She often vacationed in Calcutta during her youth and graduated from Barnards college with English literature as major subject. Lahiri did enter Boston University, and received an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She currently lives in New York City. 
Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni, Epoch, The Louisville Review, Harvard Review, Story Quarterly and elsewhere. She was a recipient of a Transatlantic Review award from the Henfield Foundation in 1993, and a fiction prize from The Louisville Review in 1997. From 1997-98 she was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.