Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Biography

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winning novel The God of Small Things. The award is second highest honour for world literature after Nobel Prize and she won this greatest award for her first published book. This award winning book is the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is always in news for her provoking statements and for her active participation in environmental and human rights causes. She is regarded as one among the most powerful and influential Indian women at present. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy of NDTV.

Roy was born on 24 November 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya. Her father Ranjit Roy is a Bengali Hindu tea planter and mother, Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist. She spent her childhood days in Kottayam, Kerala. She did her schooling from Corpus Christi school, Kottayam and Lawrence School, Lovedale in Nilgiris. She studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and married her classmate, architect Gerard da Cunha. But this marriage resulted in divorce and she met her second husband filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984. She has appeared in his critically well acclaimed movie, Massey sahib.

She started her career doing screenplay works for movies and television. She wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) for her husband. In 1996, she openly criticized Shekhar Kapoor for the movie, Bandit Queen, questioning his rights to restage the rape of a living woman without her permission. She started writing her first novel in 1992 and completed in 1996. It includes her childhood experiences in Aymanam, Kottayam. She rose to international fame and the work was published in 18 countries worldwide. She faced both appreciation and open criticism for this book.

Published: N/A

Updated: January 25, 2014