Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (Bengali pronunciation: [d͡ʒʱumpa laːɦiɽi]; born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.

The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was made into a major motion picture. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.

In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome and has since then published two books of essays, and began writing in Italian, first with the 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, then with her 2023 collection Roman Stories. She also compiled, edited, and translated the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories which consists of 40 Italian short stories written by 40 different Italian writers. She has also translated some of her own writings and those of other authors from Italian into English.

In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015 to 2022. In 2022, she became the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.

Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali immigrants Amar Lahiri and Tapati "Tia" Lahiri (née Sanyal) from the Indian state of West Bengal. Her father hailed from Tollygunge. Her mother hailed from North Kolkata. Her father moved to London in 1966, followed by her mother in 1967. They lived in Finsbury Park. In 1969, her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was three. She has a sister, Simanti Lahiri, born in the United States in November 1974, who currently works for Rutgers University as a project coordinator.

Lahiri is both an American and a British citizen. According to Lahiri, she was an Indian citizen as she acquired an Indian passport and was appended to her mother’s passport. "It meant something to [her] mother emotionally," however, it "always seemed wrong" to her. She had to renounce her Indian citizenship when she became a naturalized American. It was only later that she received the British passport. Lahiri considers herself an "American" and has said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been."

After a year in Cambridge, her family moved to South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where Amar worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent", the story which concludes Interpreter of Maladies, is modeled after him. Tia, a schoolteacher, wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Her mother was an avid reader of Bengali literature and occasionally wrote Bengali poems. Lahiri recalled that her maternal grandfather, Phani Bhushan Sanyal, a visual artist who died when she was six, would invent stories to tell her. She can speak and understand the Bengali language fluently, but she cannot read it. It was the language she used to communicate with her parents, and she was "strictly forbidden" to speak any other language apart from Bengali until the age of four.