PEN Presents: Jhumpa Lahiri with Maaza Mengiste

Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, discusses Whereabouts, her first novel in nearly 10 years—and the first book she’s translated into English from Italian. In Whereabouts, we’re immersed, through fragmentary chapters, in the life of a protagonist who luxuriates in her freedom and dreads her alienation. By turns a rootless wanderer and female flâneur, Lahiri’s narrator takes to the streets of her unnamed Italian city, as she meanders through her limitless interiority, reconsidering herself in relation to family, coworkers, and friends, often at a remove from the life and connection with which her city brims. Lahiri’s arresting prose here “shimmers with precise detail” (The San Francisco Chronicle), and her descriptions of small, solo moments resonate as the slowly-receding pandemic leaves behind an era marked by necessary distance from others, by masses of people sinking ever deeper into themselves. Of her writing in Italian—a language she vividly described honing in her acclaimed 2016 memoir In Other Words—Lahiri tells The New Yorker, “It belongs to another part of me, one that I have only recently unearthed and begun to cultivate.” Whereabouts marks a new era of artistic transformation and cross-lingual insight for one of our worldliest living writers. Maaza Mengiste, whose most recent book, The Shadow King, was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, will join Lahiri to discuss these topics and more on language, power, and outsiderness. ------------ The 2021 PEN World Voices Festival convenes fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists to honor the art of the possible and the power of storytelling to push boundaries, challenge inherited narratives, and give voice to hope, courage, and survival. In a year when division and bloodshed have been fueled by hatreds based on race, ethnicity, and religion, the Festival celebrates resilience and courage, and summons the powers of the radical imagination and literature as gateways to reckoning and reconciliation. Visit pen.org/festival to learn more about the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival.