• Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, former editor, The New York Times Book Review (chair)
  
• Joel Conarroe, president, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
  
• Wendy Lesser, editor, The Threepenny Review, Berkeley, California
  

• Who's Who Among South Asian Women
  

JHUMPA LAHIRI'S debut book, Interpreter of Maladies, is a collection of short stories, three of which The New Yorker has published.

On April 10, 2000, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first person of South Asian origin to win an individual prize. (More on Pulitzers & South Asia).

The official citation reads:

For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, $5,000. Awarded to "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Company). Also nominated as finalists in this category were "Waiting" by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books), and "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" By Annie Proulx (Scribner).

Previous winners of the Pulitzer for fiction include
such quintessentially American authors as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Henry Waulk, John Updike, Norman Mailer and Pearl S. Buck.

In May 2000, "The Third and Final Continent," a story by Lahiri that ran in a summer 1999 fiction issue of The New Yorker was one of three stories that won the magazine a National Magazine Award for Fiction.

In 1999, she was named by The New Yorker as "one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40." Her title story has been selected for the O. Henry Award and The Best American Short Stories. She was a recipient of Transatlantic Review Award from Henfield Foundation and fiction prize from the Louisville Review, and was fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Born in London, Lahiri grew up in Rhode Island and lives in New York City. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing in Boston University and the Rhode Isdland School of Design. She currently lives in New York City, where she is working on a novel.

Reviewing Interpreter in The New York Times, Pulitzer winner Michiko Kakutani wrote: "Ms. Lahiri chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise, and with 'Interpreter of Maladies,' she has made a precocious debut."

Book Excerpt (from The New York Times, free registration required)
"The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors. Mr. Kaspasi was accustomed to foreign tourists: he was assigned to them regularly because he could speak English. Yesterday he had driven an elderly couple from Scotland, both with spotted faces and fluffy white hair so trim it exposed their sunburnt scalps."

Authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Budhos at a 1999 TV interview
about South Asian authors.