Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist who writes in English.
Born Suzanna Arundhati Roy on 24 November 1961 in Shillong, she was educated at Pallikoodam, the Lawrence School in Lovedale, and the University of Delhi. Those years of schooling across different institutions preceded a career that has moved between fiction, film, and public engagement.
Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. Alongside her work in fiction, she has worked as a screenwriter and appeared as a film actor. Her essays have added a further dimension to her output as a writer, and she has received the Sahitya Akademi Award in English among the formal recognitions accorded to her work.
In 2024, Roy received the PEN Pinter Prize. Upon accepting the honour, she named Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the "Writer of Courage" — a designation that forms part of the prize's tradition. The combination of the novel, the essay, and activist engagement has defined the shape of her career, with the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize among its most recent markers.
Quotes by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy's insights on:
It is becoming more than clear that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of the process of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure in the world.
Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, maleficent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of "human rights."
There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
In Delhi the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are getting posher, the gates are getting higher, and the guards are no longer the old chowkidars, the watchmen, but they are fellows with guns. And yet the poor are packed into every crevice like lice in the city. People don't see that anymore. It's as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not many people are talking about the links between privatization, globalization, and fundamentalism.
To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and they got broken down into my body, and I sweated it out. It's not because I want to talk about 'issues.' For me, a novel is a way of seeing the world.
Today, we seem to be striving towards injustice, applauding it as though it's a worthy dream, made sacred by the caste system.