Ten years after winning the Booker Prize for her first novel, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, and a decade as one of India’s leading social and environmental activists, Arundhati Roy is planning a return to fiction, Reuters reports. She spent the time in between confining herself to non-fiction, championing campaigns at home against large dams and international issues ranging from globalisation to the Iraq war.
“In those ten years, I, along with many other people, have been part of really unmasking this process of corporate globalisation,” 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. 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. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought — and that requires a different set of skills.”
Roy would say little about her next book, except that she had been spending a lot of time in the troubled state of Kashmir. Nor is she sure whether her new project will work — but she said she was relishing the writing process again. “There was a noise inside my head, to communicate what this process was all about, and I think I have done that,” she said, referring to her political writings. Now there is another noise inside my head.”