Arundhati Roy Biography

Born on November 24, 1961, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things. In 2002, she won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Arundhati Roy has been in the news for her opposition to the Narmada Dam project, which she has stated would only help the wealthy landowners of Gujarat. Those who argue that the dam will benefit poor peasants have roundly criticized this.

Born in Assam to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, she studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi.
She enacted the role of a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib, and wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones and Electric Moon. Roy became a celebrity overnight when her book The God of Small Things was published in1996. In the aftermath of the runaway success of The God of Small Things, Roy has published many essays and worked for social causes. She has been a vociferous critic of the neo-imperialist policies of the United States and has criticized India’s nuclear weapons programme.

Roy wrote The End of Imagination (1998), in which she castigated the Indian government’s nuclear policies. In June 2005, Arundhati Roy took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 and was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award in 2006, which she declined to accept. She has been involved in a fair bit of controversy including her article on Shekar Kapur’s celebrated film ‘Bandit Queen’, about Phoolan Devi, in which she accused Kapur of exploiting Phoolan Devi and misrepresenting the events related to her life. In 2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the India’s Supreme Court and sentenced to symbolic one day’s imprisonment besides paying a fine of Rs. 2000.