The Barnard Creative Writing Program is thrilled to welcome Idra Novey (‘00) to Barnard for her first event since her graduation, in conversation with Director of Creative Writing, Jhumpa Lahiri (‘89). Her new novel Take What You Need explores the fractured relationship between a stepmother and daughter and their familial hurt and familial love with, as novelist Garth Greenwell writes, a “ferocious intelligence about the impulse to make beauty in a country coming apart at the seams.”
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel Take What You Need was named a spring fiction pick with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and selected as one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 so far. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and her second novel Those Who Knew was a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Glacier" published in The Yale Review.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. Other books include The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award, the essay collection, Translating Myself and Others, and most recently, Roman Stories. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. The translator of three novels by Domenico Starnone and editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama and was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella.