Arundhati Roy birth anniversary today
24.11.2013
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 Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian
Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession.
She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala,
schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless
lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah
Kotla and making a
living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the
Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.
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,
corrupt 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.
Roy was awarded
the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social
campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.
In June 2005 she
took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006
she was awarded the Sahitya
Akademi award for her
collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept
it.
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