Thrity Umrigar, Author

2009 MID-CAREER ARTIST WINNER IN Literature

As a young child growing up in Bombay, India, author Thrity Umrigar first explored her urge to write by crafting ‘anonymous’ poems to her parents whenever she felt wronged by them, then secretly pinning them to their closet door. “I learned early on that writing was a good way to get rid of pent-up feelings,” she recalls.

She continued to write poems, short stories, and essays throughout her teen years. She didn’t really consider herself a writer, though, until that night in her living room when a poem called “The Old Man” just flowed through her hands, as if someone were dictating it to the 14-year-old girl. Today, she considers the piece sappy, but when she set down her pen that night, she was exhausted and fully conscious of something new and exciting stirring within herself.

Throughout her youth, Umrigar’s ancient, mysterious, and complex homeland gave her much to write about, instilling her with a hypersensitive awareness of the abject poverty all around her. Writing gave her the tools to make sense of it all and “give wings to the inchoate feelings and emotions” she experienced.

Still, a couple of things needed to happen before she could truly capture the worlds swirling inside of her and put them into words. Knowing she needed to leave India to gain a clearer perspective, become independent and discover exactly who she was as a person, she explains, she realized she must live in a place where she could succeed or fail purely on her own talents.

After graduating from college in Bombay, Umrigar decided to move to the US. Once again, her living room proved a turning point in her life. While checking off a list of American universities that offered an MA in journalism, her eyes fell on The Ohio State University just as a record on the turntable played Joan Baez’s song “Banks of the Ohio.” She interpreted it as a sign to relocate to Columbus, Ohio. Three years later, in 1985, her MA in Journalism from OSU in hand, she initiated her award-winning journalism career at the Lorain Journal and continued at the Akron-Beacon Journal.

In 1997, Umrigar earned her PhD in English at Kent State University and a few years later, won the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University where she wrote her first novel, Bombay Time. She joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University in 2002. Today, she is an Associate Professor, and she teaches fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and African-American and American literature.

But she’s perhaps best known internationally for the depth and meticulous storytelling that define her novels Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, and If Today Be Sweet, as well as her memoir First Darling of the Morning. Her latest novel, The Weight of Heaven, published earlier this year, chronicles the triumphs and tribulations of an American couple who move to India shortly after their seven-year-old son dies from meningitis and then endure a monumental clash of cultures.

The book adeptly tackles Umrigar’s favorite topics. “I am simply a writer who is interested in examining issues of power and community,” she observes. “Whether it’s power arising from gender or class or caste or race differences, who has it and who doesn’t and how each responds, it’s just something that endlessly fascinates me.”