Skip to main content

Bio/ Contact

Photo by Madhu Kapparath

Anuradha Roy is a writer and potter. She was born in Kolkata and grew up mostly in Hyderabad, India, though she lived in many places through her nomadic childhood. She studied Literature at Presidency College, Kolkata and at Cambridge University, UK.

Roy has written five novels. Her first, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was translated into sixteen languages and was voted Book of the Year in a number of places, including Washington Post, Seattle Times, and Huffington Post. It was Editor's Choice, New York Times. Sleeping on Jupiter, her third novel, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. All the Lives We Never Lived won the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Award, one of India's highest literary honours, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Anuradha Roy was a Resident at the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs (the Foreign Writers and Translators House) at St-Nazaire, France in 2022, and has been a visiting speaker at Cornell and Cordoba Universities. In summer 2023 she was guest speaker at the Oxbelly Writer's Retreat in Messinia, Greece, and in autumn 2023, she was a writing fellow at the Hawthornden Foundation's Casa Ecco in Lake Como, Italy. She has appeared at literary events all over the world and on the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and other television and radio channels.

Roy's other honours and awards include the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year, the Economist Crossword Prize, and the Sushila Devi Prize 2022. In 2020, Anuradha was conferred the Nilimarani Sahitya Samman for Outstanding Contribution to Indian Literature. Her non-fiction has been published in magazines such as Guardian, Paris Review, LitHub, Daily Beast, Hindu, Indian Express, Vittles, Noema, Freeman's, and in books such as Tales of Two Planets (ed John Freeman) and Aam Aastha: Indian Devotions (with Charles Fréger and Catherine Clemént).

Roy lives in Ranikhet, where she is a graphic designer at Permanent Black, a scholarly press she runs with her partner, Rukun Advani, and four dogs. She makes and sells small batch ceramics at Sleepy Dog Pottery, the proceeds from which go to a local animal charity.


Contact:
<raysensheila@gmail.com>
Facebook : anuradharoy'sbooks
Instagram: @foldedearth



Popular posts from this blog

HOUSE ON A MOUNTAIN

"...some people have the mountains in them while some have the sea. The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea-people wherever they are – in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead centre of a desert – and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed. Hill-people, even if they are born in flatlands, cannot be parted for long from the mountains. Anywhere else is exile. Anywhere else, the ground is too flat, the air too dense, the trees too broad-leaved for beauty. The colour of the light is all wrong, the sounds nothing but noise." The Folded Earth For three days it had rained as if the sky had turned into a giant shower. It was my third trip to Ranikhet and yet again I was leaving without a glimpse of the high peaks. It didn’t matter. The sound of rain on a tin roof, the dry spells when the hills were honey-coloured in the newly-washed air: who needs more? Then someone sa

All the Lives We Never Lived wins the Sahitya Akademi Award 2022

  Anuradha Roy bags coveted Sahitya Akademi Award, 22 others feted Anuradha Roy bagged the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award on Thursday. The author of 'All The Lives We Never Lived ' was felicitated along with 22 other authors for their exemplary contribution in the field of literature. This is the fourth book penned by the 40-something Roy. This book also won the prestigious Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2018. The book revolves around the life and times of a horticulturalist Myshkin, who narrates his life story, and his unending wait for letters from etters from the mother who abandoned him, for greener pastures in another country. Roy, who lives in Ranikhet, has previously written 'An Atlas of Impossible Longing', 'The Folded Earth' and 'Sleeping on Jupiter' which won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the year 2015. Read more at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ma

Language, Lost and Found

In France for a long spell earlier this year, everyone around me speaking in a language I didn’t speak or read, I began to think about the many streams of language I've swum in. My mother tongue, Bengali, was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language had left me. I tried to find my way back to it through writers like Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan. In "Language, Lost and Found" out now in Noema Magazine, I write of how I found it again, and of language in alien contexts. I'm not sure if this essay is travelogue or memoir or a bunch of stories. But here it is, and I hope you will read it.  It was a red paperback with a green, winking cat spread across its large front. Just a few taps pulls it up on my screen now, and I wonder if my mental image of the day my father came with it as a gift for my brother and me is the work of memory or imagination. He walks in as if he has a happy secret and l