“When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.”

Indian author and political activist

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist. She is best known for her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction that year and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. Her work and public life have also been shaped by her activism on human rights and environmental issues. In 2024, she won the PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN, and she chose the imprisoned British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the Writer of Courage with whom to share the award.