“When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.”

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.