Indian novelist and political essayist whose 1997 debut The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, sold eight million copies, and then — to the frustration of nearly everyone who wanted another novel — was followed by twenty years of political non-fiction before a second novel appeared. Roy was trained as an architect, wrote two screenplays in the late 1980s, and produced in The God of Small Things an autobiographical-tinged family novel set in Kerala about the twins Rahel and Estha, the "love laws" that govern caste and kinship in their community, and the catastrophe set off when their mother Ammu loves across caste. The prose is lush, unhurried, and formally confident in a way first novels almost never are.
The non-fiction years were a principled choice, not a writer's block. Roy used the platform the novel had given her to argue, at book length and in print campaigns, against the displacement of hundreds of thousands by the Narmada Valley dam projects (The Greater Common Good, 1999); against the Indian nuclear tests (The End of Imagination, 1998); against the American war on terror and the Bush administration's Iraq invasion (Power Politics, 2001; An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, 2004); against the Indian state's anti-Maoist counterinsurgency in the Dandakaranya forests of central India (Walking with the Comrades, 2011); against the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi's BJP; and, in a 2014 introduction to Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste (The Doctor and the Saint), in a direct and much-disputed quarrel with Gandhi's record on caste.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), the second novel, gathers twenty years of non-fiction preoccupations into a sprawling fiction of contemporary India — the intersex protagonist Anjum in a Delhi graveyard community, the Kashmiri insurgency, the Dandakaranya forests. It did not find the universal readership of the first book and was not meant to.