Rupi Kaur is a Canadian poet, illustrator, photographer and author. She is popular for her Instapoetry, which confronts social taboos. Her vulnerable, brief yet shareable verses about love, trauma, feminism, and abuse have attracted a wide following. She is best known for her three poetry collections, Milk and Honey (2014), The Sun and Her Flowers (2017), and Bodies at Home (2020).
Wiki/Biography
Rupi Kaur was born on Sunday, October 4, 1992, in Punjab, India (31 years old as of 2023). Her zodiac sign is Libra. Her father immigrated to Canada before she was born. Her father was an activist who was forced to flee India due to violent hate crimes against Sikh men. Her childhood was spent with her mother and maternal grandparents. Lupi did not meet her father until she and her mother immigrated to Canada when she was three years old.
Poet Rupi Kaur’s childhood photos with his parents
Her family moved around for a while in search of job opportunities before settling in Toronto’s Brampton neighborhood. She had a difficult childhood. She didn’t speak fluent English until she was 10 years old. Her father worked as a truck driver and earned a few hundred dollars a month, which was not enough to support a family of six. Growing up, she lived in a one-bedroom basement apartment with her parents and three younger siblings, who all slept in the same bed. Speaking of her humble beginnings in an interview, she said:
We couldn’t afford toys growing up. My parents would take us to the thrift store and we would buy books for a dollar each. “
She attended Turner-Fenton Middle School. She was a voracious reader as a child, loving the works of Robert Munsch, and some of her favorite books growing up were the Junie B. “The Game of Virtue” and “Chrysalis”. Her first exposure to poetry was when she read Sikh scriptures written in verse. She used to perform kirtan (religious hymns), sing and play the organ. She discussed this issue in an interview and said:
Sikh scripture written in verses is sung when a child is born and recited when someone gets married or dies. So poetry is part of my daily life. I learned early on that poetry is how we explain great ideas in simple terms. “
There was always a true spirit of radicalism in Kaul. When she was a child, she would accompany her activist father to various human rights protests on the weekends. He also signed her up for a speech contest. Inspired by her mother, she began painting. Her typically Indian parents encouraged her to study science and discouraged her dream of entering fashion school. Thereafter, she studied for a BA in English Literature at the University of Waterloo. In college, she studied rhetoric and professional writing.
appearance
Height (approximately): 5′4″
Hair color: black
Eye color: black
family
Parents and siblings
His father is a truck driver. She has three siblings, two sisters and a brother. Her brother’s name is Saheb. One of her sister’s names is Prabhu Kaur.
Poet Rupi Kaur and her parents
Rupi Kaur with her sisters and brother
husband and children
She is unmarried.
religion
She believes in Sikhism.
Signature/Autograph
Signature of poet Rupi Kaur
Profession
Rupi Kaur started performing poetry in 2009. She has performed spoken word poetry and participated in poetry slams and open mic events. In high school, Kaul published her work anonymously. Around 2013, she began sharing her work on Tumblr without a pseudonym, then moved to Instagram in 2014, adding simple illustrations to her text. The first poem she posted on Instagram was about a wife dealing with her husband’s alcoholism. Soon, she amassed a following. On November 4, 2014, she self-published her first book of poetry, Milk and Honey, through Amazon’s CreateSpace platform.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s first poetry collection, Milk and Honey (2014)
In March 2015, Kaul posted a series of photos on Instagram as part of her college photography project, a visual rhetoric course. In the photo, she is lying on her side, looking from behind, with menstrual blood leaking from the crotch of her sweatpants and stains on the sheets. She aims to challenge social taboos about menstruation and the objectification of women. Instagram removed the photo due to censorship, and she later posted viral comments on Facebook and Tumblr. She wrote,
Their patriarchy is leaking. Their misogyny is leaking out. We will not be censored.
Instagram later backtracked, saying the photo had been “accidentally deleted.” This incident raised the profile of Kaul’s poetry, and Milk and Honey (2014) became a hit. Publisher Andrews McMeel subsequently reprinted the book with widespread commercial success. The book’s themes revolve around survival, feminism, relationships, the immigrant experience, and overcoming sexual trauma. The book sold 2 million copies in 25 languages and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year (77 weeks). In an interview, she shared that her favorite line from Milk and Honey is:
When you put your fingers inside me looking for honey that won’t come for you, you must know you’re wrong.”
At 22, she started a company and hired seven people to work for her. After self-publishing her first book of poetry, Milk and Honey, Call signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster. Her second book of poetry, The Sun and Her Flowers, was published by Andrews MacMill on October 3, 2017. Divided into seven sections, the book reflects the life cycle of a flower, focusing on love and loss, trauma and abuse, healing, femininity and the body. The book hit No. 2 on Amazon’s bestseller list a week after its release. Within two weeks of publication, it was in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s second collection The Sun and Her Flowers (2017)
Rupi once said that as a child she would ignore her mother in the supermarket because her accent embarrassed her. She doesn’t like people seeing her with her. This anecdote is reflected in her poem “Broken English,” in which she criticizes herself and anyone who has ever felt ashamed of their immigrant mother. she wrote,
So how dare you laugh at your mother, when she opens her mouth and the broken English spills out, her accent is as thick as honey, hang on with your life, it’s the only thing she has left from home
In 2019, Penguin Classics invited her to write the preface to Kahlil Gibran’s new version of “The Prophet”. It is expected that the book will enter the public domain in the United States. She also performed at the London Book Fair. As of 2020, the book has sold more than 1 million copies and has been translated into multiple languages. In 2018, she earned nearly $1 million from poetry sales. She also participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival that year. When COVID-19 hit, Kaur hit writer’s block and subsequently held workshops on Instagram. She published her third book, Home Body, in 2020. The collection, published by Andrews McMeel and featuring Kaul’s illustrations, became one of the best-selling books of 2020.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s third album Home Body (2020)
In 2021, she self-produced Rupi Kaur Live, a first-of-its-kind poetry special on Amazon Prime Video. Beyond the realm of poetry, Lupi is making waves in larger feminist work. On September 27, 2022, Simon & Schuster published her fourth book, “Healing Through Words.” In 2023, she wrote an article titled “History shows that Punjab has always stood up to tyrants.” Modi is no exception,” which was featured in the Washington Post. That same year, Kaul collaborated with Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine to write and narrate an original song for the short film “Rise” poetry.
Favorites
- Concept artist: Marina Abramovic
- Painters: Amrita Sher-Gil, Frida Kahlo
- Singer: Adele, Beyoncé
- Writers/Poets: Bulleh Shah, Sharon Olds, Kahlil Gibran, Nizar Qabbani
Facts/Trivia
- Rupi revealed in an interview that her father wrote Punjabi poetry in letters to her mother while living in Japan soon after their marriage. Her mother used to practice painting.
- As a child, she had a rocky relationship with her very orthodox mother. When Lupi got her period at the end of eighth grade, her mother’s first question was: “But you don’t even eat chocolate and ketchup! How could something like this happen to you?” Clearly, her mother believed what these wives were about Stories that can lead to early menstruation. Whenever Rupi gets her period, her mother would tell her not to go out or ride a bike, and when Rupi wouldn’t listen to her, she would say “Your mother-in-law will hate you and no one will marry you!”
- Growing up, she suffered from endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing severe pain. She frequently fainted and was frequently picked up by the university ambulance because the cyst would rupture.
- She endured years of childhood sexual abuse. She discussed adolescence, a challenging period of time, on numerous occasions, and her poetry often addressed the physical and emotional effects of sexual assault. However, she said in an interview that her book is not entirely autobiographical. she says,
These books are not 100% autobiographical. There are – it’s emotions, yes, maybe, but they’re also stories that my sisters or my cousins or my mom or my aunts go through every day. So I have the ability and the privilege to write poems about their experiences. “
- She was officially inducted into the Brampton City Arts Walk of Fame. Her induction ceremony was held in conjunction with the Sikh Heritage Month celebrations in April 2018. During the ceremony, she performed selected poems from her second collection of poems, The Sun and Her Flowers, at the Rose Theatre.
- She adopted the stage name “Kaur” because it was a surname common to all Sikh women and symbolized the elimination of the caste system in India. She believed that for a young Sikh girl, encountering her last name in a bookstore would be empowering.
- Since Gurmukhi does not distinguish between lowercase and uppercase letters, Kaur wrote her work entirely in lowercase, using only periods as punctuation. Kaur writes this in honor of Punjabi.
- In 2020, she was named Writer of the Decade by the American publication The New Republic.
- British singer-songwriter Sam Smith has a tattoo of an illustration of Rupi, a heart filled with flowers from her book The Sun and Her Flowers (2017) flowers.
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education