Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, actor, and political activist. Her debut novel, The God of Small Things, received the 1997 Booker Prize, and her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an outspoken advocate of environmental and human rights causes, which has often placed her at odds with Indian legal authorities and her country’s middle-class establishment.

Her many works of nonfiction include An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire; Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; Capitalism: A Ghost Story; The End of Imagination; Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (with John Cusack); and The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. In 2019, Haymarket Books published My Seditious Heart, a collection of her essays from the past twenty years.

Roy was the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.