Jhumpa Lahiri (Bengali: ঝুম্পা লাহিড়ী; born on July 11, 1967) is an American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language and her characters, often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural values of their birthplace and their adopted home.

Lahiri's fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Bengali communities with which she is familiar. Lahiri places struggles, anxieties, and biases under her microscope so as to better chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant psychology and behavior. No gesture, no sorrow is spared in her examinations.

Until Unaccustomed Earth, her concerns were confined, for the most part, to Indian immigrants to America and their struggle to raise a family in a country very different from theirs. She wrote about first-generation immigrant parents' struggles to keep their children acquainted with Indian culture and traditions. She wrote about how the parents struggle to keep their children close to them even after they have grown up in order to hang on to the Indian tradition of a joint family, where the parents, their children and the children's family live under the same roof.

In her recent Unaccustomed Earth, she moves on to a scrutiny of the fate of the second and third generations. As succeeding generations become increasingly assimilated into Western culture and are comfortable in constructing global perspectives, Lahiri's fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. The readers sees more clearly the departure of the second and following generations from the constraints of their parents.

The latter were especially devoted to community and their responsibility to other immigrants; in Unaccustomed Earth there is a departure from the original ethos, and Lahiri's characters embark on paths marked by alienation and self-obsession. Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American, stating, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; the protagonist of Lahiri's story "The Third and Final Continent" is based on her father.

Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing of their Bengali heritage,[citation needed] and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

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