Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer, best known for her book The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Her parents were Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation anager from Calcutta and Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala. When she was two, her parents divorced, and she returned with her mother and brother to Kerala. For some time, the family lived with her maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. When she was 5, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school. Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical in nature. It captures a major part of her childhood experiences in Aymanam. This book gave Arundhati Roy international fame and was also a commercial success. After that she wrote several non-fiction books which includes The End of Imagination (a critique against the Indian government's nuclear policies), The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers, War Talk and Walking with Comrades. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in June 2017, 20 years after her first novel. It has been chosen for the Man Booker Prize 2017 Long List. She currently lives in Delhi. Read More Read Less