Jhumpa Lahiri, Doctor of Letters
Born in London of Bengali parents, raised in Rhode Island with long visits to family in Calcutta, your bicultural perspective has deepened your perception of what one critic has called “the uniqueness of ordinary life.” When asked to state your identity, you have said, you have always had to check the box marked “other” and your art focuses on the domestic struggles of people who never fully feel at home. With great attention to detail, you have constructed wonderfully generous portraits of characters whose everyday trials reveal the core of human dignity. This you convey in prose so deceptively simple that, as one critic has said, “You almost forget you’re reading,” and through plots so elegantly constructed they have been compared with fine mathematical proofs. Stories you wrote on the side while pursuing a Ph.D. became the collection Interpreter of Maladies, which made you the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer for Fiction. But as the immigrant father says to his son at a turning point in your novel The Namesake, “In America anything is possible. Do as you wish.”
I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 5, 2005