Bozar

You just heard Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy live at Bazaar in Brussels.

How can you understand the whole story and not just your own part in it? Welcome to Writers and Thinkers Stage, a podcast by Bozar where we share favorite moments from our live conversations.

Arundhati Roy came to Bozar in October 2025 to present Mother Mary Comes to Me, her long-awaited memoir revisiting a life of courageous descent.

A life deeply shaped by her relationship with her mother, the Indian educator and women's right activist Mary Roy.

In this episode, joined by Belgian journalist and writer Catherine Welstieke, Arundhati Rohr recalls her last visit to her mother's home and reflects on how facing cruelty as a child shaped her voice as a writer, the deeply empathetic novelist she became.

Of course, it's not.

So it's all in search of some kind of a truth, which is like not a fact, but a musical note that has to be correct.

Thank you for listening to Writers and Thinkers Stage by Bozar.

And you'll see the Royal Library.

You'll see Beaux-Arts, which is like the Centre for Fine Arts.

And there are other buildings positioned around the edge of the square.

And the square is designed so well that there's carefully controlled heights.

Read for LibriVox.org.

The statue by Victor Rousseau in the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels.

Angel, hast thou betrayed me? Long ago in the forgotten land of souls that wait, thou ledest me to the outward-folding gate, bidding me live.

I leaned into the flow of earthward-rushing spirits, fain to know what are humanity and human fate, of which the rumor reached to where we sate in our cool, hidden, dreamless ante-glow.