Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India and spent her childhood in Ayemenem, Kerala, India where her novel, The God of Small Things, takes place. Her mother was a Syrian Christian (paralleling that of the Syrian Christian Ipe family) and her father was Hindu. When her mother divorced her father, Roy’s mother became responsible for managing a tea plantation. Roy didn’t attend school until the age of 10. She speaks of being her mother’s “guinea pig,” because, like Ammu in her novel, her mother wished to start her own school (Jana).

            Before the success of The God of Small Things, Roy studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. After a failed first marriage to architect Gerard de Cunha, she supported herself as an aerobics instructor at a five-star hotel in New Delhi. Confessing she had always wished to be a writer, she was not given the opportunity until she met her second husband, director Pradip Krishen and he granted her entrée into the world of film with a part in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib (BBC News). She would later write the screenplays for Krishen’s films In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (a movie based on her experience as an architecture student in which Roy is a performer) and Electric Moon (BBC News).

Since the publication of The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy has made millions on sales of the breakthrough premier novel and was rocketed to celebrity when she won the prestigious Book Prize (Jana). It was hailed by TIME as one of the five best books of 1997 ("Books: The Best Books of 1997"). Critical reception of her novel in the U.K. was mixed. The Guardian called the contest—that which led to Roy’s Booker Prize for The God of Small Things—“profoundly depressing” (BBC UK) and a 1996 Booker Prize judge dubbed the novel “execrable” (BBC News). Some in India were equally outraged; although, they were fuming more over the novel’s depiction of intercaste sex. Mr. Sabu Thomas, a lawyer and resident of Roy’s home state of Kerala, brought Roy up on charges of obscenity (Bumiller). Roy answered the summons and all charges against her were dropped.

Although Roy is yet to write a second novel, she has since lent her pen to several Indian causes. In 1998, she wrote "The End of Imagination," a work criticizing India’s nuclear weapons testing—the work appears in her 1999 collection The Cost of Living, which also includes her scathing criticism of several Indian hydroelectric dam-building projects. She continues to be an open critic of the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan, Israeli national policy in regards to Palestinians, the Indian government’s response to the Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India, and a supporter of the Kashmiri separation movement (BBC News).