Lahiri was born in 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She has traveled several times to India, where both her parents were born and raised, and where a number of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies are set. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. A winner of the Henfield Prize from the Transatlantic Review, she has published stories in The New Yorker, Agni, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her stories will appear in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Jhumpa received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collection of short stories, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. She currently lives in New York City.