Arundhati Roy wins Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award for ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’
The announcement comes ahead of the seventh Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL), scheduled to take place from January 29 to February 1, 2026.
Celebrated author and activist Arundhati Roy has won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award 2026 for her novel, Mother Mary Comes to Me.
The award, now in its seventh edition, carries a cash prize of ₹200,000 and a sculpture. It honours an English-language book published in India that has made a lasting contribution to contemporary literature, whether originally written in English or translated from an Indian language.
A personal and political work
Roy’s latest bookis a deeply personal exploration of her complex and often strained relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, while also engaging with questions of memory, family and power. Blending memoir with social and political reflection, Mother Mary Comes to Me, situates the intimate within broader struggles for justice.
Mary Roy was a prominent educationist and social activist who fought a landmark legal battle that secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in India, reshaping gender justice within the community. Her life and legacy form a central emotional and historical axis of the book.
Roy is one of the most influential figures in Indian English literature and is internationally renowned for winning the Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel, The God of Small Things. Alongside her fiction, she is widely known for her essays and activism on politics, human rights and social inequality.
Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel, The God of Small Things. (Sources: amazon.in)
Praise from Mathrubhumi
Announcing the award, Mathrubhumi Group Managing Director M V Shreyamskumar praised Roy’s ability to distil profound emotional complexity into spare, powerful prose. He said her writing combines clarity with intensity and said that, in an era marked by polarisation and the politics of hatred, Roy has remained fearless and uncompromising in speaking truth to power.
Roy on writing the book
Accepting the honour, Roy described Mother Mary Comes to Me as the most difficult book she has written. She said much of it was written at night and revisited the next morning, as she grappled with some of her deepest fears and emotions.
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She referred to her mother as “the wildest woman” she has ever known and described the book as an act of love, one that embraces both her mother’s brilliance and her contradictions.
The announcement comes ahead of the seventh Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL), scheduled to take place from January 29 to February 1, 2026. This year’s festival is themed “Paradox of Space” and celebrates the liberating scope of human imagination and creative expression.
Founded in 1923, Mathrubhumi has been a central force in Kerala’s social and political life for more than a century. The literature festival, launched in 2018, extends that legacy into the realms of culture and ideas, bringing together writers, artists and thinkers from around the world.
Previous editions of MBIFL have featured leading global voices, including Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, Booker Prize winners Shehan Karunatilaka and Jokha Alharthi, Academy Award-nominated writer and lyricist Sjón, Colum McCann, Alexandra Pringle and Jnanpith Award winner Amitav Ghosh.
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Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel, The God of Small Things. (Sources: amazon.in)
