Arundhati Roy

It’s the birthday of author and political activist Arundhati Roy (books by this author), born in Meghalaya, India (1961). She’s best known for her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), which she wrote when she was 37 years old. She said, “When people used to ask me how long it took to write The God of Small Things, I would say 37 years, because to me, a novel is not a product.” It went on to sell more 8 million copies worldwide and she gives most of her royalty money away.

It took her more than 20 years to write her next book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), about a transgender woman, known in India as a hijra. About writing, Roy once said: “To me there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.”

Roy’s father was a Bengali Hindu and her mother a Syrian Christian. She left home at 17 and began working at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, making no money and hiring a bicycle for one rupee a day to get to work. Over the years, Roy has campaigned against nuclear weapons, lived with Indian Maoists in the jungle, and exposed government corruption, inequality, and environmental destruction. She’s been thrown in jail and accused of sedition. She said: “The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever; I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere, and I live perhaps alone but in the heart of the crowd.”

Arundhati Roy once said, “There’s no voiceless, there’s only the deliberately silenced, you know, or the purposely unheard.”

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