Arundhati Roy

Roy was awarded the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. The award carried a prize of approximately US$30,000 and a citation that noted, "The book keeps all the promises that it makes". Roy donated the prize money she received, as well as royalties from her book, to human rights causes. Prior to the Booker, Roy won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in which she captured the anguish among the students prevailing in professional institutions. In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world's most powerful governments and corporations", in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity". In 2003, she was awarded "special recognition" as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco with Bianca Jagger, Barbara Lee, and Kathy Kelly. Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence. That same year she was awarded the Orwell Award, along with Seymour Hersh, by the National Council of Teachers of English. In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation. In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing. Roy was featured in the 2014 list of Time 100, the 100 most influential people in the world. St. Louis University gave Roy the 2022 St. Louis Literary Award, granted to the "most important writers of our time" to celebrate "the contributions of literature in enriching our lives". The award ceremony was on 28 April 2022. In September 2023, Roy received the lifetime achievement award at the 45th European Essay Prize for the French translation of her book Azadi. In June 2024, Roy was announced as winner of the annual PEN Pinter Prize, given by the human rights organisation English PEN to a writer who, in the words of late playwright Harold Pinter, casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze on the world and shows "fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies". English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick said Roy tells "urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty". In August 2024, Roy and Toomaj Salehi shared the Disturbing the Peace Award, a recognition the Vaclav Havel Center accords to courageous writers at risk. The award committee chair, Bill Shipsey, called them "wonderful exemplars of the spirit of Václav Havel". On 10 October 2024, Roy named imprisoned Britis