Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961.Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. Roy spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. Arundhati left Kerala for Delhi at age 16. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture. The architect Gerard Da Cunha.Arundhati Roy 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.
The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, arundhati has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India’s Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron’s activities in India. Roy 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.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence. Aarundhati took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq In June 2005. Arundhati was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, In January 2006.Early in her career, Roy worked for television and movies. Arundhati wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones 1989, and Electric Moon in 1992, in both Roy also appeared as a performer. Roy attracted attention when she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi, charging Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning.
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem or Aymanam.He book received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. It reached fourth position on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.The God of Small Things received good reviews, for instance in The New York Times.
After the success of her novel, Roy has been working as a screenplay writer again, writing a television serial, The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy in 2002. Roy announced that she would begin work on a second nove in the year 2007.Arundhati won the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for her work “about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations,” in order “to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity” In the year 2002.