Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an author of both fiction and non-fiction works. Roy was born in 1961 in the northeastern state of Meghalaya, which was then Assam. She is most famous for her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, for which she won the Man Booker Prize, and has recently published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In 2004, Roy won the Sydney Peace Prize for her political work and non-violent advocacy. She has also been listed as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People.

Since her ground-breaking first novel, Roy has dedicated her time and writing to a variety of political causes, for which she has advocated using non-fictional essays like the ones in Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. As Field Notes on Democracy suggests, Roy is a well-known critic of the Indian state’s violence and corruption, most notably in Kashmir. As suggested...