Timeline History

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things.
Roy was born in Assam to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school in Corpus Christi. She then studied architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard Da Cunha. Roy lives in New Delhi.

Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradeep Kishen, in 1984, and became involved in film-making under his influence. She played 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. She also wrote the screenplay for The 'Banyan Tree', a television serial.
Roy began writing The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished it in 1996. She received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam. Contrary to some assumptions, Roy is not one of twins. This misinformation arose from the assumption that the character of Rahel is based on herself. We see this in the physical description of the character in her adulthood and also by some of this character's interactions with her mother, Ammu .
Arundhati Roy is the cousin of the famous media personality Prannoy Roy.

The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's nuclear weapons and power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.
In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes.
In 2006, Roy signed a letter calling Israel's attacks on Lebanon a "war crime", and accused Israel of "state terror".


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