Pulitzer Prize-winner Lahiri heads to Picador with ‘extraordinary’ Roman Stories

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri is moving to Picador with her “intimate and poignant” collection Roman Stories.

Publisher Mary Mount will release the book in October 2023 after UK and Commonwealth rights including audio were acquired from Matilda Forbes Watson at WME. Jordan Pavlin at Knopf will release in the US. Racconti Romani, the original Italian book, was published by Guanda last month. Lahiri translated Roman Stories from the Italian with Todd Portnowitz.

The book is Lahiri’s third collection of short stories and is set in and around the city she calls home and centred on characters who are cast adrift in myriad ways. Picador said: “These intimate and poignant stories are rich with her signature gifts: lyrical prose, emotional wisdom, visceral imagery and overwhelming universality.”

Lahiri lives between New York and Rome. Her début collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (Flamingo), was published in 1999 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. It also won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best Fiction Début of the Year. Her first novel The Namesake (Fourth Estate) was published in 2003 and was made into a feature film directed by Mira Nair. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with The Lowland (Bloomsbury), which was also a finalist in the National Book Award for Fiction and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015. In 2018 she published her third novel Whereabouts (Bloomsbury).

Mount said: “Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the greatest short story writers in the English language and Roman Stories is an extraordinary work: deeply resonant, timeless and yet completely contemporary, and brilliantly acute on the way we live now. It is such a thrill and honour that Jhumpa has joined the Picador list.”

Lahiri commented: “I am delighted to join Picador’s list and grateful for the warm welcome that Roman Stories has already received.”