Jhumpa is a Bengali pet-name (often distinct from the formal name) meaning "cluster" or "bouquet" — also a colloquial word for the dangling earrings worn at weddings. Jhumpa Lahiri (born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, 1967) — *American author of Bengali descent; her debut story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — making her, at 32, the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for fiction at the time. The Namesake (2003) — about a Bengali American family's negotiation of identity through the son's namesake Nikolai Gogol — sold 1.5 million copies and became a Mira Nair film (2006). PEN/Hemingway Award (1999); National Humanities Medal (2014, Obama). Has since moved to Rome and writes in Italian — her In Other Words (2015) and Whereabouts (2018) are originally Italian works she later translated to English herself. Currently a creative-writing professor at Barnard**.
Subject of countless American fiction studies.
Jhumpa reduces to three — the number of Pulitzer.