Calcutta as Memory and Projection: A Literary Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri, Suketu Mehta, and Neel Mukherjee

Jhumpa Lahiri is a professor of creative writing at Princeton. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. Other works include her first novel, The Namesake (2004), and a second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her most recent book, In Other Words, was publisihed in 2017. Lahiri was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015.

Suketu Mehta is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You,’ and a novella, What is Remembered (2016). Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York.

Neel Mukherjee is a critically acclaimed novelist. He is the author of A Life Apart (2010), winner of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, among other honors, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Prize. His most recent novel is A State of Freedom (2017). Born in Calcutta, he now lives in London.

The Louis A. Simpson International Building is located off William Street between the Julis Romo Rabinowitz building and Robertson Hall on the Princeton University campus.

View directions and campus maps, information on parking and public transit, and other venue information on our Venues & Directions page »

Learn about access information on our Accessibility page »