Obama to Award Medal to Indian-American Author Jhumpa Lahiri

In Awards and Honours
September 4, 2015

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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Who is Pulitzer?

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Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher. Pulitzer introduced the techniques of “new journalism” to the newspapers he acquired in the 1880s. He crusaded against big business and corruption, and helped keep the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Today, he is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, which were established in 1917 by money he bequeathed to Columbia University to recognize artistic and journalistic achievements.