Reuters reports that Arundhati Roy is returning to fiction 10 years after her landmark novel "The God of Small Things" won her worldwide acclaim.
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize for her first novel "The God of Small Things" but has since confined herself to non-fiction, championing campaigns at home against large dams and international issues ranging from globalization to the Iraq war.
She has published several collections of essays, including "The Algebra of Infinite Justice" and "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire".
Now, she says it is time to turn another chapter in her life.
"In those ten years, I, along with many other people, have been part of really unmasking this process of corporate globalization," she said an interview with Reuters.
"But now I feel the fundamental argument has been made, and I would stagnate as a writer if I carried on doing that.
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Roy would say little about her next book, except that she had been spending a lot of time in India's troubled state of Kashmir. Nor is she sure whether her new project will work -- but she said she was relishing the writing process again.
Read the full Reuters story.
While there is a lot of overlap among fans of TGOST and Roy's essays, over the years, not all devotees of the novel have agreed with Roy the essayist. In 2001, SAJAer Aseem Chhabra wrote in Rediff about Americans who took issue with some of Roy's essays.
I, for one, am really looking forward to her novel. TGOST is one of the top five books I have ever read. And as a Keralite, I believe I picked up nuances and subtle aspects of the story and the settings that all non-Keralites missed. Sure, the rest of the readers were able to figure out things through context and the glossary, but a real Malayalee got an extra degree of pleasure from the book.
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