After a long span of ten years, Arundhati Roy is planning to return to fiction writing once more. After winning the Booker Prize for her first novel, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, in 1997, she has almost spent a decade as one of the major social and environmental activists in India, supporting campaigns against large dams and international issues right from globalization to the Iraq war.

Roy mentioned very less about her next book, apart from, that she had been taking out a lot of her time in the problematic state of Kashmir. She said that she was relishing the writing process once again; however, she wasn’t definite if this project of hers would be successful too. She has even published a number of essay collections, including “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire”. With her upcoming book she tends to turn a new chapter in the book of her life.

Regarding her decade long activist career, she said, “In those ten years, I, along with many other people, have been part of really unmasking this process of corporate globalisation. 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’. She added, ‘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.”

She said that she was aware that the times and situations have changed a lot. The world, according to her is a new and different place now and she is writing about it differently. She stands by everything she writes and is particularly disturbed by the judgments of country’s courts, especially in the issues concerning big dams. The role of an activist is one she has never felt at ease with, neither as a person nor as a writer. This is a statement pretty hard to digest, as far as I am concerned.

Via:mediabistro/reuters/images 57017