SOURCE: "Indian's First Novel Wins Booker Prize in Britain," in The New York Times, October 15, 1997, p. A4.

[In the following article, Lyall reports on Roy's winning of the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things.]

An Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, was awarded England's prestigious Booker Prize this evening for her first novel, The God of Small Things, a soaring story about a set of twins struggling to make sense of the world, themselves and their strange and difficult family in southern India.

The international best seller, published by Random House, created a star when Ms. Roy's combined advances reportedly came to more than $1.6 million. Ms. Roy, who is 37, lives in New Delhi.

Gillian Beer, a professor of English literature at Cambridge and the chairman of the Booker judges, said the book was written with "extraordinary linguistic inventiveness."

The Booker Prize, worth more than $32,000, is awarded annually to...