Spectator Books

In this week's books podcast, Sam Leith is joined by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Someone whose own fiction has negotiated the cross-cultural territory of her Bengali-American identity, Jhumpa in the last few years has been negotiating a new crossing of cultures after settling in Rome with her family and starting to write fiction and memoir in Italian. She joins the podcast to discuss the _Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories_, which she edited, and talk about what a new language gives a writer, how the war shaped Italian literature, and why - as a professor of creative writing at Princeton - she refuses to teach creative writing.