Indian's First Novel Wins Booker Prize in Britain

An Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, was awarded England's prestigious Booker Prize this evening for her first novel, ''The God of Small Things,'' a soaring story about a set of twins struggling to make sense of the world, themselves and their strange and difficult family in southern India.

The international best seller, published by Random House, created a stir when Ms. Roy's combined advances reportedly came to more than $1.6 million. Ms. Roy, who is 37, lives in New Delhi.

Gillian Beer, a professor of English literature at Cambridge and the chairman of the Booker judges, said the book was written with ''extraordinary linguistic inventiveness.''

The Booker Prize, worth more than $32,000, is awarded annually to a novel published in the past year by a writer from Britain or one of the Commonwealth countries. It is considered Britain's most distinguished literary prize, but the award is usually riven by controversy, with people criticizing the judges for not naming one book or another to the six-book short list and the judges themselves, who plowed through 106 novels this year, often failing to reach a happy consensus.

The other books short listed for the prize this year were ''The Underground Man,'' Mick Jackson's story of an eccentric nobleman haunted by his past; ''Europa,'' by Tim Parks, about a broken-hearted middle-aged man's bus tour en route to the European Parliament in Strasbourg; ''Quarantine,'' by Jim Crace, a daring retelling of the story of Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness; ''The Essence of the Thing,'' a novel by the Australian writer Madeleine St. John about a seemingly compatible couple's abrupt separation in London, and ''Grace Notes,'' by the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty, about the personal and professional struggles of an up-and-coming musician.