Arundhati Roy: Portal to a New World

We are thrilled to welcome back one of the world’s best-respected authors to discuss her new book of essays, Azadi. The slogan of the struggle in Kashmir for what Kashmiris regard as the Indian occupation, ‘Azadi!’ is the Urdu for ‘Freedom!’. It also became a chant on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism.

In the light of the COVID-19 outbreak, freedom has, Roy says, taken on another meaning and in a new book of essays she invites us to see the pandemic as a portal between one world and another. Here, she argues, is our opportunity to imagine a better future. Arundhati Roy’s own career as a novelist began with the extraordinary success of her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things in 1997. Since then she has published two further novels as well as a major collection of essays last year. In today’s event Roy joins us from India for a wide-ranging discussion with essayist, broadcaster and journalist Bilal Qureshi.