Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist and essayist, known for her award-winning novel God of Small Things. She is also an activist, campaigning against the Narmada Dam Project and globalization, and was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004.
Arundhati Roy, born 24 November 1961, is an award-winning Indian novelist and essayist. Her critically acclaimed novel, God of Small Things, won the 1997 Booker Prize and the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Most Beautiful People in the World” in 1998.
Arundhati Roy was born to a Syrian Christian mother in Meghalaya and spent her childhood in Kerala, a place which is the focus of her only published work of fiction to date. She left Kerala at the age of 16 and embraced a bohemian lifestyle in New Delhi, even selling empty beer bottles to make a living. She eventually attended the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. It was during this period that she met her first husband, architect Gerard DaCunha. In 1984 she married director Pradip Krishen.
Arundhati Roy’s mother, Mary Roy, is most famous for denouncing an archaic law that denied Christian women in India the right to inherit their parents’ property. Mary Roy won a historic Supreme Court decision and the law has since been repealed. Perhaps following in her mother’s activist footsteps, Arundhati Roy has shifted her focus from literature to various political projects, the most famous of which is her campaign against the Narmada Dam Project, which she says could displace over half a million people for a small fee. So strong was her faith in this cause that she donated much of her Booker Prize money, as well as the earnings of various non-fiction publications, to the campaign.
Arundhati Roy is also notoriously against globalisation, US foreign policy and India’s nuclear weapons. Roy has been called anti-American on numerous occasions, most notably in regards to her reaction to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 9 attacks on New York City.
Arundhati Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 for her work and position on nonviolence. She announced work on a second novel in early 2007.
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