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  • Published: 18 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241366516
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1040
  • RRP: $75.00

My Seditious Heart




Collected essays and speeches from the bestselling, Booker-winning author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, the essays speak in a uniquely spirited voice, marked by compassion, clarity and courage. Radical and superbly readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites.

In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from 'The End of Imagination', which begins this book, to 'My Seditious Heart', with which it ends.

  • Published: 18 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241366516
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1040
  • RRP: $75.00

About the author

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997, and two collections of essays: The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. She lives in New Delhi, India

Also by Arundhati Roy

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Praise for My Seditious Heart

The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable

John Berger

Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time

Naomi Klein

Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach

Noam Chomsky

Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays

Howard Zinn

Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time . . . courageous, visionary, and erudite

Cornel West

Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings

Wallace Shawn

The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating

New York Times Book Review

Roy is of course a consummate storyteller...[the essays] are thick with intelligence and firmly bolstered with fact.

The Observer

'every page gifts you her far seeing, her calm and intelligent urgency, the wisdom and relief of her articulacy, her courage'

Ali Smith