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On the face of it, Alain de Botton: the people's philosopher, has very little cause to be anxious. The 34-year-old writer was enthusiastically received at the recent Sydney Writers Festival. His popularity stems from his ability to make sometimes weighty subjects attractive to the general reader. In it, he managed to unlock some of the mysteries in the work of the great literary master, for people who might otherwise be plain scared of tackling it

Feeding the Soul: Stellar novelist takes peace prize
Arundhati Roy, the lyrical Indian novelist, political activist and human rights campaigner, is the winner of the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize.
Roy rose to prominence as the author of The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, but is just as well known today for her clashes with authority. She described her relationship with authority as "genetically adversarial".
Roy said from New Delhi: "Today, in a world convulsed by violence and unbelievable brutality the lines between 'us' and 'the terrorists' have been completely blurred. We don't have to choose between imperialism and terrorism; we have to choose what form of resistance will rid us of both.
"What shall we choose? Violence or non-violence? We have to choose knowing that when we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalise others, we brutalise ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors."
My writing is not really about nations and histories, it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power.
She predicts: "Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature."
She has argued that Osama bin Laden is "America's family secret", the monstrous offspring of its support for the mujahideen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America's foreign policy."
The bombs raining down, she says, are "blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury" and will inevitably spawn more terrorism.
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