Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: how does the world look through a different language?

My guest on this week’s books podcast is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Someone whose own fiction has negotiated the cross-cultural territory of her Bengali-American identity, Jhumpa in the last few years has been negotiating a new crossing of cultures after settling in Rome with her family and starting to write fiction and memoir in Italian. She joins me to discuss the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, which she edited, and talk about what a new language gives a writer, how the war shaped Italian literature, and why – as a professor of creative writing at Princeton – she refuses to teach creative writing.

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