Love, Distance, Return: Arundhati Roy’s Memoir on the Women’s Prize Shortlist.

Arundhati Roy’s intimate memoir about her complex relationship with her mother earns a spot on the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist.

on Mar 26, 2026

Arundhati Roy is back in the literary conversation, this time with something far more intimate than fiction. Her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, now shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, isn’t just a story about her life-it’s a story about her mother, and everything that came with loving her.

That mother, Mary Roy, looms large on every page. Roy describes her as “my shelter and my storm,” and the phrase feels earned. Mary Roy was strong, determined, and fiercely independent-the kind of woman who could take on the system and win, as she did in the Mary Roy inheritance case that changed inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala. But at home, she could also be exacting, unpredictable, and hard to please.

Roy doesn’t try to turn this into a simple story of admiration or forgiveness. Instead, she sits with the discomfort. She writes about leaving, about the distance that grew between them, and about the complicated pull of coming back-especially in moments of loss.

What makes the memoir linger is its honesty. There’s no tidy ending, no clear resolution. Just the recognition that love and hurt often live side by side, especially in families. And in tracing that bond, Roy quietly asks a question many people will recognise: how much of who we are is something we’ve chosen-and how much of it we’ve inherited.