Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

Roy was born in Shillong,to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women’s rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali father, a tea planter by profession.She spent her childhood in  Aymanam in Kerala.

Early in her career, Roy worked for television and movies. She wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture.Roy attracted attention when she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi, charging Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.

Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem or Aymanam.

The book received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. It reached fourth position on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.

Bibliography

• The God of Small Things.
• The End of Imagination.
• The Cost of Living.
• The Greater Common Good. .
• The Algebra of Infinite Justice.
• Power Politics.
• War Talk.
• Foreword to Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State.
• An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire.
• Public Power in the Age of Empire Seven Stories
• The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile
• Introduction to 13 December, a Reader:
• The Shape of the Beast: