Jhumpa Lahiri: The 2026 Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture

Each year the Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture is given by notable creative writers and remembers Richard Hillary, the author of The Last Enemy, who was a student at Trinity. The event is free and open to all. This year's lecture will be given by Jhumpa Lahiri. 

Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for writing about immigration, identity, language, and cultural displacement. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her acclaimed novel The Namesake (2003) was later adapted into a film directed by Mira Nair, while her story collection Unaccustomed Earth won the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel The Lowland was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

Lahiri has also written extensively in Italian. Her works include In Other Words, The Clothing of Books, Whereabouts, Roman Stories, and Translating Myself and Others. She has translated several novels by Domenico Starnone and edited The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She is currently collaborating with classicist Yelena Baraz on a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Born in London to Bengali parents and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri often draws on the tensions of living between cultures. She studied at Barnard College and earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Boston University.

Her honours include the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University, and divides her time between New York and Italy.