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Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

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My cast away this week is the writer Arundati Roy, a booker prize-winning author she is a confounding literary presence, issuing categorisation to take her job description at its word.

A novel here, a polemic essay there, always writing yes, but defying the traditions and expectations of both the publishing world and her readership.

There's been a 20-year gap between her much loved and lauded debut novel The God of Small Things and her latest fictional offering.

In the decades between she has published provoking work on poverty, globalization and oppression, making plenty cultural waves in her homeland of India,

and a good few enemies along the way too.

She says of her most recent writing, I think there's something beautiful, strong, direct and clear sighted about pamphleteering when it's well done.

It throws down the gauntlets and infuriates the comfortable classes, apart from everything else, it's great fun to watch them lose their cool.

So, welcome.

After publishing that debut novel two decades ago, it sold six million copies, the encouragement for you to keep on doing the same thing and to sell more and more novels must have been huge. How did you resist?

Well, I don't know whether that's a myth, you know, that after all people can only put pressure on you if you accept that pressure, you know.

But I wasn't ever the person who wanted to become a assembly line writer, you know.

Also things changed very dramatically in India around that time. When I won the booker prize and I was on the cover of every magazine, not that I'd been saying it, but I was sort of being marketed as this new product of the global India.

And then suddenly the government did these nuclear tests. And for me, I realized that because I was at that point embraced by the establishment, not saying something was as political as saying something.

And I wrote this essay condemning the tests. And at that point, the fairy princess was kicked off her pedestal in a minute, you know.

But I write things because sometimes I just can't not write them.

Well, what about that given the diverse nature of your writing? What's the starting point for you?

I was going to say, put pen to paper. I'm sure it's not that. I'm sure it's a keyboard. But what's the starting point?

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