Arundhati Roy

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes. Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta. When she was two, her parents divorced and she returned to Kerala with her mother and brother. The God of Small Things is not unvarnished autobiography by any means, but she herself has called it "semi-autobiographical". The action of the novel takes place in the backwater town of Ayemenem.