Jhumpa Lahiri was born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri in London in 1967, the daughter of Indian immigrants from West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was two years old, and she was raised in Kingston, Rhode Island. Her father was a university librarian, and her mother a teacher. "Jhumpa" was her pet name rather than her good name, but it was the name that she came to be known by in school in the United States, an experience shared by her character Gogol Ganguli in The Namesake. She started to write as a young child, and would often use creative writing to explore her feelings of alienation, the notion that she never fully belonged to any one place.
Lahiri studied English...
