#The art of stillness preview how to

She left home in 1976 to attend the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi and has lived in the capital ever since, without practicing architecture. Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, in IndiaвЂ™s northeast, and grew up mostly in Kerala, on the southwestern coast. Her essays, in turn, are as powerfully and lovingly written as her fiction, with the same suspicion of purity, perfection, and simple stories. The God of Small Things is a novel focused on one family, while The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has a larger scale, but in the questions they ask and the themes they explore, both novels are as вЂњpoliticalвЂќ as any of her essays.

#The art of stillness preview how to

RoyвЂ™s subject and obsession is, throughout, power: who has it (and why), how it is used (and abused), the ways in which those with little power turn on those with less-and, importantly, how to find beauty and joy amid these struggles. The essays exist between the novels not as a wall but as a bridge. To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand RoyвЂ™s project when finding herself described as вЂњwhat is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a вЂwriter-activist,вЂ™вЂ‰вЂќ she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel вЂњlike a sofa-bedвЂќ).

Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages less than a year later she published nine new essays in Azadi. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Outlook, Frontline, and the Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Interviewed by Hasan Altaf Issue 237, Summer 2021ДЄfter her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017.