After a Decade, Booker Winner Roy Plans New Novel

The Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy is to write her first novel in 10 years after a decade of campaigning against India's dam building programme, its possession of nuclear weapons and its support for George Bush's "war on terror".

Roy, author of the dreamlike novel The God of Small Things, gave up fiction for a career in social activism that saw her briefly imprisoned and last year reject an award from India's academy of letters because she opposed the government's policies.

During that time she has written polemics lamenting the rise of Hindu chauvinism and the impact of globalisation on the developing world.

Her collections of essays and journalism, such as The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, have remained on the bestseller lists.

"I will be writing a novel. I want to say things where I am not always walking a fine line. In fiction I will not have to consider what to say or what not," she said yesterday. She did not yet know what the book would be about, she said.

Recently she has been looking at India's often bloody hold on the state of Kashmir and at a little-reported but brutish fight between Maoist guerrillas and Indian paramilitary forces in the forests of central India.

Roy also frequents Delhi's seminar circuit, last week taking in a lecture by leading Chinese leftwing professor Wang Hui about private property in a communist state.

The 45-year-old writer said that a novel would help her express her thoughts. She has told interviewers that she has said all that she can about the face of "corporate globalisation".

"As a writer I have to go to a different place now. As a person ... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given.

"The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills."

It had become clear that she needed another way to discuss change in the world. "I am very conscious that, from the time The God of Small Things was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world, a different place now, which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that," she said.