Desi Today Magazine
I’ve recently vowed to put away the smut escapist fiction women all over the world are readily indulging in, and read more challenging and engaging fiction. Where better to look than at the work of Pulitzer prize winners? The Pulitzer prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature, and musical composition. Looking through the list of highly deserving writers, I happened upon some names of Indian origin. Awarded for their writing, here’s a look at some Pulitzer prize winners of Indian origin.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mukherjee is the fourth person of Indian origin to bag the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, the first being Gobind Behari Lal way back in 1937. He is a cancer physician and researcher, and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. His award-winning nonfiction work “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, published by HarperCollins, was described by the jury as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”.
Geeta Anand
Journalist-writer of Indian origin Geeta Anand was the next to get the award named after Joseph Pulitzer, who stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. The investigative reporter and feature writer for the Wall Street Journal was given the award in 2003 for “clear, concise and comprehensive stories that illuminated the roots, significance and impact of corporate scandals in America”.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2000 for her collection of stories “Interpreters of Maladies”. She was awarded $ 5,000 for her “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”. Lahiri was born in 1967 in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her parents were born and raised in India, where a number of the stories in “Interpreter of Maladies” were set.
Gobind Behari Lal
Gobind Behari Lal came today study at the University of California in Berkeley in 1912 on the Guru Govind Singh Sahib Scholarship. He later became the science editor of the San Francisco Examiner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937. Lal was science editor emeritus for the Hearst newspapers and worked for the group in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles since joining The San Francisco Examiner in 1925. He was awarded the Pulitzer in the Reporting category for his coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University when he was working for Universal Service. He died in 1992 of cancer.
