Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, the first Indian-American to take the award. The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008), The Lowland (2013): three decades of stories about the first and second generations of Bengali-American life, told in a registered English so unflashily controlled that a generation of MFA students learned, from her sentences, what restraint can do. Then, beginning around 2012, a project that few American novelists at her stature would attempt — moving to Rome, learning Italian, and writing first essays then a novel in the new language. In altre parole and Dove mi trovo are, by any reading, an act of voluntary literary exile. Princeton, where she runs the creative-writing programme, is now her American home. She continues to publish in two languages.