Revisit: Arundhati Roy
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Arundhati Roy, the Man Booker prize winning author and campaigner, is in conversation with Philip Dodd about a life in the public eye and the novel she published 20 years after The God of Small Things. She discusses the politics of Kashmir, the influence of architecture and why she chose a graveyard setting for her novel and how writing a transgender character Anjum, who is a Hijra, helped her tell the story. Her second novel is called The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
The virtual Women of the World Festival takes place June 27-28 2020 https://thewowfoundation.com/wow-global-24/ You can find a playlist of Free Thinking conversations called Women in the World https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp
Producer: Zahid Warley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | Hello, I'm Philip Dodd, and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Discussion Program from BBC Radio 3. |
| 0:43.1 | If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe to the Arts and Ideas podcast, and wherever you get your podcasts from, do rate and reviewers. |
| 0:52.6 | It'll help other people to find us. It is not many writers who have |
| 0:57.6 | battles with courts of law for 20 years or more, and not many who wait 20 years after the global |
| 1:04.9 | success of their first novel to publish a second. Nor is it many novelists who between their two novels publish a regular stream of essays, |
| 1:14.2 | pamphlets and books on subjects ranging from nuclear war to the ghosts of capitalism, |
| 1:20.3 | making them the hated target of politicians and their supporters. |
| 1:25.6 | Well, one who does is my guest in extended conversation, |
| 1:29.8 | Arundati Roy, whose new novel is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. |
| 1:35.1 | Her first was the Booker Prize winner, |
| 1:37.5 | The God of Small Things, which went on to sell more than 6 million copies globally. |
| 1:43.0 | Even then, the social and the aesthetic went hand in hand. |
| 1:47.6 | Language is such a deeply political thing for us. |
| 1:51.8 | You know, we are questioned about why we speak and write this language. |
| 1:56.6 | For me, language is the skin on my thought. |
| 2:01.1 | You must make the language do what you wanted to do. |
| 2:05.3 | I think in this way, and I'm trying to tell you how I think. |
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