Arundhati Roy became famous in 1997 when her first novel,
The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize, became a commercial and critical sensation, and was translated into many languages. For twenty years afterwards, Roy produced no fiction at all, concentrating on essays and pamphlets published in various media and collected in a dozen volumes between 1998 and 2016.
In June 2017, she published a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The novel covers a period of time ranging from the 1950s to the end of 2016, focusing mainly on two aspects of Indian history and society: the lives of Hijras (third gender and transgender people) and the ongoing occupation of Kashmir by the Indian army. Its subject matter is rather somber, as it chronicles the ruthless oppression of the Kashmiri
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Citation: Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 December 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=36017, accessed 25 April 2024.]
