She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. By all metrics, she is a very accomplished English writer. Lahiri was raised bilingually in the United States, speaking Bengali at home and English everywhere else. There is one question that pervades the narrative: Why would Lahiri choose to write in a language that is not her own?
And yet, award-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri has done exactly that, and she details her journey from native English to Italian in her recent essay collection, In Other Words. It is rare for someone, especially a writer, to abandon their mother tongue without cause. Others want to advance their careers, like Salman Rushdie, who acknowledged the only way he could get a wide readership is by writing in English rather than his native Kashmiri.
Sometimes someone is forced, like Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his first nine novels in Russian, but began writing in English in the United States after being exiled from his home country. When people devote themselves to learning a new language, there is usually a reason for it.
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