Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, India, in 1960 to a Syrian Christian mother and a Hindu father. The marriage did not last. When Roy was a toddler, her mother, Mary Roy, obtained a divorce and returned to her ancestral home in Kerala, India, where she started a school and raised her two young children. Arundhati Roy was a student in her mother’s school until age 11, after which she attended a boarding school. At the age of 16, she ran away from home to study at the Delhi School of Architecture. She eventually left architecture and teamed up with film director Pradip Kishen to write the screenplay for and star in a mildly successful parody of Indian college life called, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988). On the strength of Annie, Roy was hired to write the screenplays for the television series Electric Moon (1992). When the series ran out of money, she turned to novel writing. For four-and-a-half years, she wrote five hours a day to produce The God of Small Things, her only novel to date. Roy has since written for social causes, producing work that displays the political savvy so apparent in The God of Small Things.
