« Headlines | Next Story »

May 15, 2003

Arundhati Roy: “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free”

Roy2

The award-winning Indian author addresses a packed audience at Riverside Church in Harlem as “a slave who presumes to criticize her king.”

Two nights ago, the famed Indian author Arundhati Roy spoke to a packed crowd at Riverside Church in Harlem, New York.

She spoke out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, from the same pulpit where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke out against the invasion of Vietnam over three decades ago.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. It has sold six million copies and has been translated into over 20 languages worldwide.

She has also written three non-fiction books: The Cost of Living, Power Politics and her newest book War Talk, a collection of essays analyzing issues of war and peace, democracy and dissent, racism and empire.

A year ago she was the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom.

Arundhati Roy named this speech, “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free.” The speech was sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Lannan Foundation.

  • Arundhati Roy, acclaimed Indian author and activist, speaking at Riverside Church in Harlem on May 13, 2003. Roy won the Booker Prize for her first book, the novel The God of Small Things. She is also the author of Power Politics and War Talk

Links:

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

« Headlines | Next Story »