Friends of the Wellfleet Public Libraries present their 2012 Distinguished Speaker, Pulitzer prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, on Thursday, July 19 at 7:30pm at the Welllfleet Congregational Church. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at the Library.
Ms. Lahiri will read from her forthcoming novel and then sit down with Ilan Stavans for a wide ranging conversation about her life and work. Questions will also be accepted from the audience. There will be a book signing after the talk. Copies of books by Jhumpa Lahiri and Ilan Stavans will be available for purchase & signing.
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, serves on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and was recently named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the most distinguished honors in the arts. Her debut collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first novel The Namesake was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Her most recent collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth was named a best book of the year in 2008 by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and many other publications.
Ilan Stavans, one of today's preeminent essayists, cultural critics, and translators, is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College-Forthieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University. He is the author of many books, has edited several anthologies and has received numerous awards and honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, the Southwest Children Book of the Year Award, an Emmy nomination and the Latino Book Award. His story "Morirse esta en hebreo" was made into an award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah (2007), produced by John Sayles. His forthcoming titles are, as translator, Juan Rulfo's The Plain in Flames (Texas, 2012) and Pablo Neruda's All the Odes (Farrar, Strau, and Giroux, 2012, and, as author, Return to Centro Historico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots (Rutgers, 2012) and a biography of the novel Don Quixote, forthcoming from W.W. Norton.