Jhumpa Lahiri to deliver Fagles Lecture

Princeton Classics is delighted to welcome writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri back to campus as Princeton's 2026 Robert Fagles Lecturer for Classics in the Contemporary Arts. A world-renowned author of over a dozen books of fiction, short stories, and translation, Lahiri will appear on October 13 to deliver “Ovid Inside Out,” an exploration of her work translating Ovid's with Princeton Classics chair Yelena Baraz.

A bilingual writer and translator, Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Namesake, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, was adapted into a feature film directed by Mira Nair. Her other books include Unaccustomed Earth, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and soon to be adapted as a Netflix drama series; The Lowland, a finalist for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award; and Translating Myself and Others, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

In Italian, Lahiri is the author of 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 (partially self-translated as Roman Stories). Her work has received numerous honors, including the National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2014. In 2019, she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella, and in 2024 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lahiri’s lecture comes as she completes a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, undertaken in collaboration with Yelena Baraz, Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin at Princeton University. The translation will be published by Modern Library in May 2027.

Established in memory of classical translator and University professor Robert Fagles, the Fagles Lecture brings to Princeton distinguished writers or artists whose work engages with classical studies. The event is hosted by Princeton’s Classics Department and is open to the public. Support for the Fagles Lectureship is provided in part by Princeton's Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, the Humanities Council, Princeton University Public Lectures Committee, Program in Humanistic Studies, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. The inaugural Fagles Lecture was delivered in 2017 by poet Alice Oswald, since followed by poets Anne Carson, Ishion Hutchinson, and A.E. Stallings, novelist Kamila Shamsie, translator Daniel Mendelsohn, and playwrights Mary Zimmerman and Luis Alfaro.