Arundhati Roy and Aslak Sira Myhre
Twenty years after her critically acclaimed debut and Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has returned with a new novel.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Norwegian translation by Kirsti Vogt) is a sprawling story, peopled with a number of unconventional characters. It is a novel moving playfully in time and place, between past and present, between Dehli and Kashmir.
Roy has called it a novel about borders, from the physical partition of India and Pakistan, and the many borders crisscrossing through Kashmir to the borders that split the hijra, or trans woman, Anjum and the many other characters who in different ways lead double lives.
Since her debut novel, Roy has become a prominent activist and non-fiction writer. Her activism has undoubtedly found its way into the new novel, through apt descriptions of globalization’s class divisions, power abuses and religious nationalism.
At the same time, the novel is filled with Roy’s unmistakable bubbling prose, satirical stabs, surprising imagery, playful diversions and refreshing looks at all the peculiar things, people and events that make up the world around us.
With The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy manifests her position as one of the most prominent literary writers of our time.
Roy will meet former director of th House of Literature and current director general of the National Library of Norway, Aslak Sira Myhre, in conversation.
Billettsalg forfattersamtale English Litteraturhuset Wergeland http://litteraturhuset.ticketco.no/med_skrift_som_vaapen