Indian-American Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri has been selected for the prestigious 2014 National Humanities Medal. Ms. Lahiri, the author of “The Lowland,” will receive the prize in Washington from US President Barack Obama. The Medal honors those who have widened the public’s engagement with literature and “deepened the nation’s understanding of the human experience.
Previous winners include Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen who won it “for his insights into the causes of poverty, famine, and injustice.”
Points to Note
- Lahiri, whose parents originate from West Bengal, was born in London but moved to the U.S.
- In January, Ms. Lahiri was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for her most-recent book “The Lowland”.
- Her book “Interpreter of Maladies” won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2000. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
- The first National Humanities Medal was awarded in 1996.
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