Who won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Interpreter of Maladies?

Jhumpa Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Interpreter of Maladies.

Published in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories about Indian and Indian American characters negotiating family, migration, cultural identity, loneliness, and belonging. Several stories move between India and the United States, connecting intimate personal conflicts to the wider experience of diaspora.

The award was notable because the Pulitzer category had officially been called the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel until 1947, and Lahiri won for a short-story collection rather than a novel. That distinction sometimes causes confusion, but the prize rules had already broadened to recognize distinguished fiction published in book form.

Lahiri also received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for the collection. Her later books include The Namesake, a novel adapted into a 2006 film, and the story collection Unaccustomed Earth.