Arundhati Roy with Howard Zinn

This is a recording of an In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom event from September 18, 2002.

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, actor, and political activist. Her debut novel, The God of Small Things, received the 1997 Booker Prize, and her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is an outspoken advocate of environmental and human rights causes, which has often placed her at odds with Indian legal authorities and her country’s middle-class establishment.

Her many works of nonfiction include An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire; Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; Capitalism: A Ghost Story; The End of Imagination; Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (with John Cusack); and The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. In 2019, Haymarket Books published My Seditious Heart, a collection of her essays from the past twenty years.

Roy was the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. His classic book, A People’s History of the United States, has been called “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”

Zinn grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class, immigrant household. At 18 he became a shipyard worker and then flew bomber missions during World War II. These experiences helped shape his opposition to war and his passion for history. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a PhD in history from Columbia, he taught at Spelman College, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by the college for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

Zinn was the author of many books, including an autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train and Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice. He received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism.