The Booker prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy will publish her first memoir next September.
In the book, titled Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy will reflect on her complex relationship with her mother and her life from childhood to the present, moving from Kerala to Delhi. “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022, and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write the memoir, said Penguin publishing imprint Hamish Hamilton, “to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18”.
“I have been writing this book all my life,” said Roy. “Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject”.
Roy won the 1997 Booker prize for her debut novel, The God of Small Things. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in 2017 and longlisted for the Booker. She has also written several nonfiction books including The Architecture of Modern Empire, My Seditious Heart and Azadi.
In June, Roy was announced as the winner of the PEN Pinter prize, awarded annually to a writer who, in the words of the late playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world. This was announced two weeks after Indian authorities granted permission to prosecute the writer over comments she made about Kashmir 14 years ago.
On 14 June, Delhi’s most senior official sanctioned the prosecution of the writer under India’s stringent anti-terror laws because of a comment Roy made at an event in 2010 that the disputed region of Kashmir had never been an “integral” part of India. Hundreds of Indian academics, activists and journalists signed an open letter calling on the government to withdraw the decision.
Roy’s memoir will be published on 4 September 2025. “What an astonishing book this is – a triumph of a memoir, magically combining all the many elements of Arundhati Roy’s life and writing,” said Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton. “Riveting, radiant and revelatory, it is also radically honest, frequently funny and deeply moving. Arundhati is a wonder and an inspiration – and so is this book.”
