Becoming a writer: Arundhati Roy and Athena Farrokhzad

Due to issues during the recording, the sound quality is somewhat lower than normal.

In the recent memoir of Indian star author and activist Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me, we are given the raw and honest story of Roy’s life and childhood with a many faceted mother who was far from easy to live with.

Arundhati Roy’s mother Mary took her two small children and left her alcoholic husband, brought her own family to court in order to abolish the discriminatory inheritance laws in her home state, and built a unique school that made her a beloved and almost mythical figure of her community and beyond. Towards Roy and her brother, however, she was volatile, sharp and cruel. Still, Roy insists that this forced her to see the world from different vantage point, turning her into the writer she is today.

The memoir also depicts Roy’s own path, leaving home for a world of film, literature and activism, towards a backdrop of India’s growing Hindu nationalist movement, spearheaded by Modi. We witness Roy’s incessant fights against this movement, on behalf of the environment, of local communities and minorities.

As in Roy’s earlier literature, Mother Mary Comes to Me shows us how the personal and political is intimately linked for all of us. Roy portrays her own path as well as those around her with both warmth and bite, in the precise, inventive, and deeply original language that has become one of her distinctive features.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the Booker prize winning The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and a number of non-fiction books, including My Seditious Heart, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom og Walking with the Comrades.

At the House of Literature, Roy was joined by poet and writer Athena Farrokhzad, for a conversation about her mother, her childhood, and becoming the writer and activist she is today.

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