Roy Arundhati

Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961)[1] is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.[citation needed] She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.[3]

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India,[4] to Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta.[5] When she was two, her parents divorced and she returned to Kerala with her mother and brother.[5] For some time, the family lived with Roy's maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. When she was five, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school.[5]

Roy attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met architect Gerard da Cunha. The two lived together in Delhi, and then Goa, before they separated.[5]

Roy returned to Delhi, where she obtained a position with the National Institute of Urban Affairs.[5] In 1984, she met independent filmmaker Pradip Krishen, who offered her a role as a goatherd in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib.[6] Later, the two married. They collaborated on a television series on India's independence movement and on two films, Annie and Electric Moon.[5] Disenchanted with the film world, Roy experimented with various fields, including running aerobics classes. Roy and Krishen eventually separated.[5] She became financially secure with the success of her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997.

Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the Indian television media group NDTV.[7] She lives in Delhi.[5]