Author(s): Arundhati Roy

Literature | Politics | Snips

Collected essays and speeches from the bestselling, Booker-winning author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness   My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights, and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her twenty year journey from the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things to the extraordinary The Ministry of Utmost Happiness a journey marked by compassion, clarity, and courage. Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual, and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites.   In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from "The End of Imagination," which begins this book, to "Azadi," with which it ends.

Review: 'every page gifts you her far seeing, her calm and intelligent urgency, the wisdom and relief of her articulacy, her courage' * Ali Smith *
Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time -- Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach -- Noam Chomsky
Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays -- Howard Zinn
The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating * New York Times Book Review *
Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time . . . courageous, visionary, and erudite -- Cornel West
Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings -- Wallace Shawn
Roy is of course a consummate storyteller...[the essays] are thick with intelligence and firmly bolstered with fact. * The Observer *

Author Biography: Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Roy has also published several works of non-fiction, including The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers and Broken Republic. She lives in Delhi.