Susanna Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya to Mary Roy, an activist and feminist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a tea plantation manager from Calcutta. She has a brother, Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy, who is 18 months older than her.
Arundhati’s parents divorced when she was 2. She was brought up in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. She attended The Lawrence School, Lovedale and obtained a degree in architecture from the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture.
She began her career as a screenwriter with ‘In which Annie Gives it Those Ones’ in 1988. She won the National Award for Best Screenplay for the movie. She went on to write another screenplay, ‘Electric Moon’ in 1992.
Her first book, ‘The God of Small Things’, which she began writing in 1992 and completed in 1996, won the Man-Booker Prize for fiction in 1997 and made her an international celebrity. The book is partially autobiographical and tells the story of fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha set against the complex background of political upheaval, casteism and personal tragedy.
Roy went on to write another novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ in 2017. The novel was chosen for the Booker Prize Long List.
Although winning the Booker Prize was a watershed moment and was celebrated nationwide, she has since then fallen from grace for her activism. She has been a passionate critic of India’s nuclear programme, globalization, neo-imperialism, US foreign policy and the Narmada dam project. She has written several essays on contemporary issues and continues to speak out against perceived human rights violations and injustice.
She donated her Booker Prize money towards the ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’ and returned the National Award she won for her screenplay in 1988 in protest against prevailing conditions of religious intolerance. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006, but declined it due to human rights violations against industrial workers. She was named one of the Most Influential People in the World’ by Time Magazine in 2014.
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