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Twenty years after Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, she returned to writing fiction in 2017 with her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The book was hailed for its ability to juggle “the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.” Roy spoke with Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. Together they discussed Roy's life before she became a writer, the relationships between writing and political activism, plus Roy reads from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

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