It is vanishingly rare for a writer to both confront the ugliness of humanity and still search for its beauty. Roy is that rare writer.

There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy, who has been awarded the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize. Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to recall favourite characters in her gorgeous novels and some of her greatest one-liners.

And no, I’m not talking about the ones about “another world… breathing” that were the italicised email signatures of half the people you knew in the early 2000s. I’m not even referring to “the pandemic is a portal” – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.

I’m talking about deeper cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast-forward.