Obama to Award Medal to Indian-American Author Jhumpa Lahiri

U.S. President Barack Obama will award Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri the 2014 National Humanities Medal, which honors those who have widened the public’s engagement with literature and “deepened the nation’s understanding of the human experience.”Ms. Lahiri, a Pulitzer-prize winner and author of “The Lowland,” will receive the prize in Washington next week.

Previous winners include Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen who won it “for his insights into the causes of poverty, famine, and injustice.”In a statement, the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent national agency that awards grants for cultural research, said that Ms. Lahiri had “illuminated the Indian-American experience in beautifully wrought narratives of estrangement and belonging.”

In January, Ms. Lahiri was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for her most-recent book “The Lowland,” set in both New England and West Bengal in the east of India during the 1960s when the Naxalite movement, a separatist uprising, began. The book was previously longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2013 but did not win.Her book “Interpreter of Maladies” won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2000. Ms. Lahiri, whose parents originate from West Bengal, was born in London but moved to the U.S. as a child making frequent trips to Kolkata, then known as Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal.