Arundhati Roy

Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on 24 November 1961 in Shillong, in Undivided Assam, now Meghalaya. She grew up between places, languages, and religions: her mother, Mary Roy, was a Malayali Christian women’s rights activist from Aymanam, Kerala, and her father, Rajib Roy, was a Bengali Hindu from Kolkata who later embraced Christianity and worked as a tea plantation manager. After her parents divorced when she was two, Roy returned to Kerala with her mother and brother. Her childhood included time with her maternal grandfather in Ooty, then a move back to Kerala, where her mother started a school.

Roy studied at Corpus Christi in Kottayam and the Lawrence School in Lovedale before moving to New Delhi to study architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture. There she met architect Gerard da Cunha; they lived together in Delhi and Goa before separating in 1982. Back in Delhi, Roy worked at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. Her early artistic life moved through film and television: she starred in Massey Sahib in 1985, wrote the screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, and also appeared in it. The film drew on her experience as an architecture student and won her the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1988. She later wrote Electric Moon, released in 1992.

Roy became internationally known with her first novel, The God of Small Things. She began writing it in 1992 and completed it in 1996. The book, semi-autobiographical in part, drew heavily on childhood experiences in Aymanam. Published in 1997, it won the Booker Prize for Fiction that same year and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. Its success was swift: it was sold in 18 countries by the end of June after its May publication, reached fourth place on The New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction, and was named one of Time magazine’s five best books of 1997.

The reception also brought dispute. Some major American and Canadian reviews praised the novel warmly, while response in the United Kingdom was less favorable, and the Booker Prize win caused controversy. In India, E. K. Nayanar, then chief minister of Kerala, criticised the book’s direct treatment of sexuality, and Roy had to answer charges of obscenity. By then, she had already shown a willingness to challenge public narratives: in 1994 she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, questioning the right to restage the rape of Phoolan Devi without her permission.

After The God of Small Things, Roy spent much of her time on political activism and nonfiction. She became involved in human rights and environmental causes, wrote essays on contemporary politics and culture, and became known as a spokesperson of the anti-globalization and alter-globalization movement. She criticised neo-imperialism and United States foreign policy, opposed India’s nuclear weapons policies, and challenged forms of industrialisation and economic growth that she described in Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy as “encrypted with genocidal potential.” Her essays were collected by Penguin India in a five-volume set in 2014, and her nonfiction appeared in one volume as My Seditious Heart in 2019.

Roy’s later work kept fiction, memoir, film, and dissent close together. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in 2017, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and later named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She won the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN and chose to share it with imprisoned British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the “Writer of Courage.” Roy has named writers from William Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among her influences, but she has also said that “everybody has something to teach a writer.” That breadth helps explain why her words continue to carry force: they come from art, argument, memory, and a deep suspicion of easy answers.