Arundhati Roy

Roy trained as an architect in Delhi before drifting into film work, co-writing and acting in low-budget movies through her twenties while drafting the novel that would become The God of Small Things. Published in 1997, it won the Booker Prize on the strength of its backwards-looping structure and invented, child's-eye language, telling of Kerala twins and a forbidden love destroyed by caste's 'Love Laws.'

She did not publish a second novel for twenty years, turning instead to essays and activism: opposing the Narmada dams, nuclear weapons testing, and India's Kashmir policy in prose as combative as her fiction is lyrical, and facing contempt-of-court charges for some of it. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) finally returned her to fiction, gathering a hijra, a resistance fighter, and modern India's outcasts into one sprawling chorus.

She continues to divide her time between fiction and political writing from Delhi.