Arudhati Roy is an Indian author, actress, and political activist. While she is perhaps most well-known for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things, to date the rest of her writing career has focused on political nonfiction.
Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong, a small hill town on the edge of northeastern India. Her father, a Bengali Hindu, managed a tea plantation in the area. Her mother, like the characters in The God of Small Things, came from a close community of Syrian Christians in the southwestern coastal state of Kerala. Roy's father was reportedly an alcoholic, and when Roy was 2, her parents divorced. She returned with her mother and older brother to...
