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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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  Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.  Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...
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