“A fine writer, discriminating, compassionate and surprising” Rachel Cusk

On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. In her 2015 essay collection In Other Words she described her first attempts at writing in Italian: “It’s as if I were writing with my left hand, my weak hand, the one I’m not supposed to write with.” Lahiri wrote Whereabouts in Italian before translating it into English. A haunting portrait of a woman in a beautiful and lonely Italian city, Whereabouts illustrates that in finding her voice in another language, Lahiri pushed her creative ability to new heights.

Jhumpa will be in conversation about fiction and translation with the writer Carlo Gébler.

IMAGE: Elena Seibert