Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London of Bengali parents, and grew up in Rhode Island, USA. Her stories have appeared in many American journals and her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize 2000 for Fiction, the New Yorker Prize for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Award. Jhumpa Lahiri lives in Brooklyn with her husband and young son.

From the reviews of The Namesake:
'Fantastically readable, warm and profound . . . This is a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation but never succumbs to the cliches those themes so often entail. Instead, Lahiri turns it into something both larger and simpler: the story of a man and his family, of his life and hopes, loves and sorrows. She has a talent - magical, sly, cumulative - that most writers would kill for.'
Julie Myerson, Guardian

'Eloquent. .. Lahiri's prose is striking. Spurning the antsy, trans-cultural wordplay of many Asian-American authors, she writes with journalistic precision. Like a Victorian urban chronicler, she loves to amass inventories. Things matter to her and to her characters; they are bulwarks against drift and confusion. The Namesake is lucid, generous in its narrative scope, and an extremely ccomplished first novel.'
Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph

'Good novelists, like Bengali parents, must make their creations unique, and Lahiri's central characters are painfully believable . . . An extremely good first novel, a glowing miniature of a tiny family making the voyage between two worlds.' Sunday Times