First Indian winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction

With her win on 14 October 1997, Arundhati Roy became the first Indian winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious awards in English-language literature. While Indian-origin authors such as Salman Rushdie had previously won the prize, Rushdie held British citizenship; Roy's win represented the first time an author who was both Indian by birth and residing in India took home the award.

This achievement was historically significant far beyond individual recognition. It signaled the arrival of Indian English literature as a major global force, distinct from the postcolonial diaspora writing that had previously dominated international attention. Roy, who had no formal training as a novelist and worked primarily as a screenwriter and architect before writing The God of Small Things, achieved this milestone with her very first novel.

The win broke important barriers: it demonstrated that stories rooted deeply in specific, non-Western regional experiences—in this case, the intricate social fabric of Kerala—could achieve universal literary acclaim without being filtered through a diasporic or expatriate lens. Her victory inspired a generation of Indian writers to pursue literary fiction in English while remaining embedded in Indian life, and cemented Kerala and South Indian settings as legitimate subjects for world literature.