Arundhati Roy
1 book analyzed
Biography
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) grew up in Ayemenem, Kerala — the novel's setting is autobiographical. Her parents' marriage was a transgression of its own kind: a Hindu Bengali man and a Syrian Christian woman from Kerala. She trained as an architect, worked in films, and wrote The God of Small Things in her mid-thirties. It won the Booker Prize in 1997, making her the first Indian woman to win. She has not published a second novel since — she became instead a political essayist and activist, writing about nuclear testing, dam construction, and Kashmir. The novel was prosecuted in India for obscenity; the prosecution was ultimately dismissed. Roy has said the book took four years to write and that the language came first — she heard the voices before she knew the plot.