Anuradha Roy

Novelist and winner of India’s highest literary prize Anuradha Roy talks about her memoir of building a home and garden on the edge of the Himalayan hills.

Roy describes how she and her husband stumbled across a derelict cottage in Ranikhet and decided to make it their home. She talks of her initial bemusement at the gentle pace of life in the mountains compared to the freneticism of Delhi. However, she explains how she was won over by the landscape and taken to heart by her neighbours. Roy says that over 25 years she has encountered nature at its most fierce, beautiful and vulnerable and she has witnessed the destructive impact of global warming on this fragile environment.

‘Makes you want to rush to the Himalaya, see the flower valleys and the bold leopards, gossip with the local cowherds, tend the stray dogs and help out in the author’s wayward garden. In every way a beautiful book’ Sebastian Faulks

Roy is author of five novels, including Sleeping on Jupiter, winner of the DSC Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Booker, and All the Lives We Never Lived, winner of India’s highest literary prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award.