Arundhati Roy

Earth and water take three of her ten planets each, with two apiece in fire and air, and five of the ten are mutable with only one cardinal. Not one of the ten was retrograde at her birth. The record says Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things and then spent twenty years writing political essays.

The Sun sits on the second degree of Sagittarius with Mars at seven, both in the sign built around the pursuit of something larger. Mercury, Venus and Neptune sit inside eight degrees of Scorpio, which commits totally and explains nothing. Her Moon sits at twenty five degrees of Gemini at noon and may by then have moved on into Cancer. For a writer whose record is one novel and then two decades of argument, a Sagittarius Sun over a tight Scorpio group is the division that matters: the reaching is public and the holding is not.

Saturn sits in hard contact with Pluto at just under four fifths of a degree, pressure against pressure, which reads as confrontation with power and as the enforced ending of something that had lasted. In the record of somebody who turned from fiction to political essays, that is the contact to keep. Mercury sits a fifth of the circle from Jupiter at just under a degree and a half, the angle of learning that comes easily and of making a complicated thing sound simple. The Sun sits square Uranus at just over a degree and a quarter, the urge to break out arriving at the wrong moment.

Jupiter came the whole way round to its Aquarius starting point on 1 January 2021, at fifty nine, ten weeks after Saturn had closed its own second lap, and four circuits precede it. Aquarius takes its reading from whatever refused the usual arrangement, which for a novelist who stopped writing novels is close to the whole question. Limit pressed against force, with nothing retrograde anywhere, is what to take from this chart.