MIRA NAIR &
JHUMPA LAHIRI

Saturday, March 10, 2007
at 7:00 PM
Celeste Bartos Forum

LIVE from the NYPL books

$15 general admission and $10 library donors, seniors and students with valid identification

Buy Tickets

All LIVE from the NYPL events are general admission. Arrive early for best seat selection. Box office opens 2 hours before the event and doors open 1 hour before the event. Management reserves the right to refuse admission to latecomers.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

A conversation between Pulitzer prize-winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake) and filmmaker Mira Nair, whose motion picture adaptation of The Namesake opens in the U.S. the preceding day.

About Mira Nair

Film Director Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, India. From India Cabaret to The Laughing Club of India, Nair’s documentaries paved the way for her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! which was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language film in 1988. Subsequent films include Mississippi Masala, The Perez Family, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, My Own Country, Hysterical Blindness, 9’ 11” 01 – September 11 (segment “India”), Monsoon Wedding, and Vanity Fair. In 2003, Mira Nair founded an annual filmmakers’ laboratory, Maisha, dedicated to the support of visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. She also served as the mentor in film for the prestigious Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, helping to guide young artists in critical stages of their development. Nair’s company, Mirabai Films, is currently producing a series of four films to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic in India. Her forthcoming films include The Namesake, an adaptation Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel, and Shantaram starring Johnny Depp.

About Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England to Bengali parents, and raised in Rhode Island. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Lahiri has traveled extensively to India and has experienced the effects of colonialism there as well as experienced the issues of the diaspora as it exists. She feels strong ties to her parents’ homeland as well as the United States and England. Growing up with ties to all three countries created in Lahiri a sense of homelessness and an inability to feel accepted. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was translated into twenty-nine languages. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

$15 general admission and $10 library donors, seniors and students with valid identification

Buy Tickets