Celebrating La Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo
(The Week of the Italian Language in the World)
This special edition of Il Circolo Letterario is presented as part of the 25th Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo, an annual global initiative organized by Italy’s diplomatic and cultural network. Each year the initiative highlights the Italian language as a vehicle of culture and identity beyond borders. The 2025 theme is Italophony: Language Beyond Borders.
For this special occasion, Pieranna Garavaso, Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota Morris, will present the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri.
Jhumpa Lahiri — Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author
Innamorata della lingua italiana -- In love with the Italian language
Why Italian? This is the question Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri faced again and again after moving to Rome. Known worldwide for her acclaimed works in English, Lahiri chose to immerse herself completely in Italian, embracing the challenge of expressing herself in a new language.
Her memoir In Other Words (In altre parole) is both a love story and a meditation on identity and belonging. Written originally in Italian and presented in a dual-language format, the book explores the process of learning to write in another tongue, the vulnerability of starting over as a beginner, and the freedom she discovered in embracing Italian as her literary home. Critics have called it “an honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words.”
About Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in the United States. She is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. After moving to Rome in 2012, she has written and translated in Italian, publishing both fiction and nonfiction that explore language, identity, and exile. In 2022 she returned to her Alma Mater Barnard College in New York as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English in 2022.
Learn more about Jhumpa Lahiri →
We will also host a Book Club discussion of In Other Words on Sunday, November 30 at the Italian Cultural Center.
Pieranna Garavaso is native Italian and came to the US to earn a PhD in Philosophy (at the U of Nebraska Lincoln). She taught Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Morris for 34 years. She was awarded the UMN Morris Alumni Association Teaching Award (2003), the Horace T. Morse Alumni Association Undergraduate Teaching Award (2004) and the UMN Morris Faculty Research Award (2017). Her areas of research include History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Mathematics, and Feminist Philosophies. She has published articles in Italian and English and authored, co-authored or edited several books; the last collection she has edited is the Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism (2018). As Emerita/retired she plans to devote more time to reading and discussing Italian literature.
In 2021, ICC was appointed Presidio Letterario of the Società Dante Alighieri (DA), one of the most important Italian institutions for the promotion and appreciation of Italian language and culture since 1889. ICC is now part of a network of cultural centers in Italy and abroad promoting events and initiatives related to Italian literature. Since 2009 DA has officially been part of the jury of Premio Strega, the most prestigious Italian literary award.
