🇮🇳 Arundhati Roy

She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya, to a Syrian Christian mother, the activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu tea-planter father, Rajib Roy. Her parents separated when she was two. She grew up in Aymanam, Kerala, in a house her mother had won by suing the Travancore Christian Church for a daughter's right to inherit — a case Mary Roy took to the Supreme Court and won in 1986, and which, fifteen years later, would partly inspire her daughter's first novel. The mother-daughter relationship has been described, by both women, as combative.

She studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, where she married fellow student Gerard da Cunha, then later the filmmaker Pradip Krishen. She wrote screenplays — In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), Electric Moon (1992) — and worked as a draughtswoman and a flight attendant for short stretches. She started The God of Small Things in 1992 in a small Delhi flat and finished it in 1996 in long-hand drafts that her husband typed up.

Published in 1997, the novel won the Booker Prize that year — making her the first Indian-resident citizen to win the award, and the second Indian writer after Salman Rushdie. The story of Estha and Rahel, the seven-year-old twins in Ayemenem, became one of the most translated English-language novels of the late twentieth century. It also led to an obscenity case in Kerala over its closing scene that took eleven years to dismiss.

She did not publish another novel for twenty years. Instead, she became a political essayist — against the Narmada Dam, against India's nuclear tests in 1998, against the war on Iraq, against the displacement of Adivasi communities by Indian mining corporations, against the criminalisation of dissent under the UAPA. Her essay The End of Imagination (1998) and her 2011 reportage Walking with the Comrades, embedded with Maoist guerrillas in Chhattisgarh, defined a new kind of Indian non-fiction. She has been called many things; she has accepted only one — writer.

Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), assembled a vast cast — a hijra in a Delhi graveyard, a Kashmiri militant, a Dalit mortuary worker, an architect-anthropologist — into a book that critics in India argued about for a year. Her supporters called it the great novel of post-1991 India. Her detractors called it a polemic with characters. It was shortlisted for the Booker again and translated into nearly fifty languages.

She has faced multiple criminal complaints since the late 1990s — contempt of court for her writing on the Narmada Bachao Andolan, sedition for her statements on Kashmir, charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. In June 2024, the Delhi Lieutenant Governor approved her prosecution under the UAPA over a 2010 speech on Kashmir, fourteen years after the fact. International PEN, the Authors Guild, the Booker Prize Foundation and writers from Margaret Atwood to Orhan Pamuk signed open letters in her defence. The case remains open.

She lives in a flat in Jor Bagh, Delhi, with her cats and her papers and a study lined with the books of people she has argued with. She does not own a car, does not use Twitter, and writes in long-hand on yellow legal pads before a typist she has worked with for two decades transcribes her. She has refused most awards, returned at least one (her Sahitya Akademi prize for non-fiction, in 2014), and continues to live as if every word she writes is being read by a magistrate.