The prize... was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.
Arundhati Roy
talks to Tim Adam's today in
The Observer, referring to her Booker win and subsequent shift away from fiction to political polemic. Her new collection of essays :
Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy. (Read some of her work
here and
here.)
1 comment:
Correct, you are good at something and all of a sudden, you are God, you can do no wrong. They expect that, and then are deeply disappointed that their God turns out to be human after all.
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