Arundhati Roy

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, actress, and political activist. She is best known for her debut novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction the same year. She was also awarded the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize by English PEN.

Roy was born on 24 November 1961 in Shillong, then part of undivided Assam (now Meghalaya), into a Christian family. Her mother, Mary Roy, was a Malayali Christian women’s rights activist from Aymanam, Kerala, and belonged to the Jacobite Syrian denomination. Her father, Rajib Roy, was a Bengali Christian tea plantation manager from Kolkata, West Bengal.