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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.


Contact: 

Enquiries: raysensheila@gmail.com

Agent: Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander Associates
Facebook : anuradharoy'sbooks
Instagram: @foldedearth



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Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...
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Ten years of Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’: What the writer and publisher remember ‘For three years, it was an alternative, secret universe in which I lived, awake or asleep.’  On serendipity and the difficult road to getting published: Anuradha Roy, writer  Read this in Scroll.in Christopher MacLehose and Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Rukun Advani An Atlas of Impossible Longing started in one of those “dummy books” – blank pages, hardbound – that binderies used to make to establish accurately the spine width of books that they would bind for a publisher. The publishing house was one my partner and I had recently set up. It had no capital but our savings, no office, and the only books as yet were dummies with blank pages. Because I still have that notebook, I know I wrote the first section of Atlas in pencil, in a non-stop scrawl that poured out without warning. It went on for a few pages and then came to a stop, after which the ...
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From the Reviews

"The themes of innocence stolen, the refuge of the imagination, and the inclination to look away are handled with sensitivity and subtlety in some of the best prose of recent years encountered by this reader. Roy brings a painterly eye, her choice of detail bringing scenes to sensual life, while eschewing floridness: a masterclass rather in the art of restraint, the pared-back style enabling violence close to the surface to glint of its own accord."   Rebecca K. Morrison, The Independent "Anuradha Roy’s brilliant new novel, Sleeping on Jupiter , is a riveting and poignant read...There’s a whole tapestry out there: lost innocence, displacement, violence, friendship, survival, unconventional love, rejection, and pain...all penned with excellent craft. The opening chapters are violent but etched in delicate, detached prose." Suneetha Balakrishnana, The Hindu "Both incredibly timely and extremely brave." Lucy Scholes, The National "P...
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