Roy, Arundhati, << roy, ahr uhn DUHT ee >> (1961-…), an Indian writer, won the 1997 Booker Prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997). The Booker Prize is the United Kingdom’s highest literary award. The book became an international bestseller.
The novel tells the story of Ammu, a divorced Indian woman, and her twin children. The story also portrays a love affair between Ammu and a carpenter that violates India’s caste traditions and leads to tragedy. Critics praised The God of Small Things for its explorations of family conflicts and social prejudices and for its lyrical prose style. Roy wrote the novel over a period of almost five years. It was her first published novel.
Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), is an epic account of the lives of many characters living across the Indian subcontinent over several decades in the 1900’s. Her other works include The End of Imagination (1998), a collection of five previously published books of essays, and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (1998), in which Roy describes the crushing effect of extreme poverty on hundreds of millions of people living in India.
Roy was born on Nov. 24, 1961, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Her mother was a Syrian Christian, and her father, a Hindu. She received an architecture degree from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, but she eventually turned to acting and then to writing for motion pictures and television.
