Arundhati Roy is to return to fiction writing, 10 years after winning Booker prize with her first novel, The God of Small Things.
Arundhati Roy is to return to fiction writing, 10 years after winning Booker prize with her first novel, The God of Small Things. In an interview, Roy said she would 'stagnate' as a writer if she were to continue to publish only non-fiction.
"As a writer I have to go to a different place now. As a person ... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given," said Roy in the interview. "The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought, and that requires a different set of skills."
Following her Booker win and the monumental success of The God of Small Things, Roy has spent the last decade writing non-fiction and championing grassroots activism as a social and environmental activist, her protest against the Narmada valley dam project in 2002 saw her imprisoned for a day and fined for contempt of court.
While much of Roy's campaigning work has been focused on India, she has also been an outspoken critic of America's actions in Iraq and of Israel's attacks on Lebanon last year.
Her non-fiction works include The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Power Politics, War Talk and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. Now, however, Roy says that she feels frustrated by the failure of non-violent movements to influence state actions, and the restrictions of writing political polemics.
"I also feel very imprisoned by facts, by having to get it right," she said to Reuters' Simon Denyer. "I don't want to play these games of statistics any more, I have done that. I don't want to be imprisoned by that, or by the morality that is expected of activists. I have never been that pristine person, that role model."
The report says that Roy would say little about her new book, other than that she has spent a lot of time in the state of Kashmir. The God of Small Things was set in Kerala, the state in which Roy grew up.
"I am very conscious that, from the time of The God of Small Things was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world ... which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that," she explained.
"Just as resistance movements need to reinvent themselves, to shed their tired, old slogans, we all need to find new ways of doing what we've been doing. And that includes me."
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