Rupi Kaur is a Canadian poet, painter, photographer and writer. She is popular for her instapoetry in which she tackles social taboos. Her vulnerable, short but shareable poems about love, trauma, feminism, and abuse have garnered a wide fan base. She is known for her three poetry collections Milk and Honey (2014), The Sun and Her Flowers (2017), and Home Body (2020).
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Rupi Kaur was born on Sunday, 4 October 1992 (age 31 years; as in 2023) in Punjab, India. His zodiac sign is Libra. His father had moved to Canada before he was born. His father was an activist who was forced to flee India due to violent hate crimes against Sikh men. He spent his early childhood with his mother and maternal grandparents. Rupi did not meet her father until she and her mother moved to Canada when she was three.
Childhood photo of poet Rupi Kaur with her parents
His family moved around for a while in search of job opportunities before settling in the Brampton neighborhood of Toronto. His childhood was difficult. She did not speak English fluently until she was 10 years old. Her father, who worked as a truck driver, earned a few hundred dollars per month, which was not enough to support the family of six. Growing up, she lived with her parents and three younger siblings in a one-bedroom basement flat, where they all slept on the same bed. Talking about his humble background in an interview he said,
We couldn’t afford toys growing up. My parents would take us to thrift stores and we’d buy books for a dollar each.”
He attended Turner Fenton Secondary School. She was a voracious reader as a child, she loved the work of Robert Munsch, and some of her favorite books growing up were Junie B. Jones series, the Harry Potter series, Ender’s Game, and The Chrysalids. His first encounter with poetry came when he read Sikh scriptures, which are written in poetic verse. She used to sing kirtan (religious hymns), sing and play harmonium. He talked about this in an interview and said,
Sikh scripture written in poetic verse is sung at the birth of a child, when someone gets married, or is recited when they pass away. And so poetry was part of my everyday life. I learned early on that poetry is the medium through which we can explain big ideas in simple ways.”
There has always been a real vein of activism in Kaur’s body. When she was a child, she accompanied her activist father to various human rights protests on weekends. They also signed him up for speech competitions. Inspired by his mother, he started painting. Her elite Indian parents encouraged her to study science and discouraged her from pursuing her dream of attending fashion school. Subsequently, he pursued a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Waterloo. At university, he studied rhetoric and professional writing.
Physical Appearance
Height (Approx): 5′ 4″
Hair Color: Black
Eye colour: black
Family
parents and siblings
His father was a truck driver. He has three siblings, two sisters and one brother. His brother’s name is Saheb. The name of his sister is Prabh Kaur.
Poet Rupi Kaur with her parents
Rupi Kaur with her sisters and brother
husband and children
He is unmarried.
Religion
She follows Sikh religion.
signature/autograph
Signature of poet Rupi Kaur
livelihood
Rupi Kaur started performing poetry in 2009. She presented oral poetry and participated in poetry slams and open mics. During her high school years, Kaur posted her creations anonymously. Around 2013, he began sharing his work without a pseudonym on Tumblr before moving to Instagram in 2014, where he paired simple images with his own words. The first poem she posted on Instagram was about a wife struggling with her husband’s alcohol addiction. Soon, he gathered followers. On November 4, 2014, she self-published her first poetry collection, Milk and Honey, through Amazon’s CreateSpace platform.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s first poetry collection, Milk and Honey (2014)
In March 2015, Kaur posted a series of photographs on Instagram as a part of her university photography project, a visual rhetoric course. In the photos, she is seen lying on her back, with menstrual blood leaking from between her sweatpants and stains on the bedsheet. Their intention was to challenge societal menstrual taboos and the objectification of women. Instagram removed the image due to censorship after which it posted a viral criticism on Facebook and Tumblr. she wrote,
Their patriarchy is leaking. His misogyny is leaking. We will not be censored.
Later, Instagram hit back, saying that the photo was “removed in error.” This incident increased the recognition of Kaur’s poetry and Milk and Honey (2014) gained immense popularity. It was then republished by publisher Andrews McMeel and achieved widespread commercial success. The book’s themes focus on survival, feminism, relationships, the immigrant experience, and overcoming sexual trauma. It sold two million copies in 25 languages and remained on the New York Times Best Sellers list for more than a year (77 weeks). In an interview, he shared that his favorite lines from Milk and Honey were,
You would have known you were wrong when your fingers dipped inside me looking for the honey that would not come for you.
At the age of 22, he started a company and hired seven people to work for him. After self-publishing her first poetry collection, Milk and Honey, Kaur signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster. Her second collection The Sun and Her Flowers was published by Andrews McMeel on 3 October 2017. The book is divided into 7 sections depicting the life cycle of a flower and focuses on the themes of love and loss, trauma and abuse, healing, femininity and. Body. The book ranked second on Amazon’s best-seller list a week after its release. Within the first two weeks of publication, it cracked the top ten of the New York Times Best Sellers list.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers (2017)
Rupi once shared that she used to ignore her mother in the supermarket as a child because she was so embarrassed by her accent. He did not like to be seen with them. This anecdote is reflected in her poem “Broken English” in which she criticizes herself and anyone else who has ever felt shame about their immigrant mother. she wrote,
So how dare you make fun of your mother when she opens her mouth and speaks broken English. Her accent is thick like honey, keep it in your life, it’s the only thing she has left from home
In 2019, Penguin Classics asked him to write an introduction to a new edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. This was in anticipation of that book entering the public domain in the United States. He also exhibited at the London Book Fair. As of 2020, the book has sold over one million copies and has been translated into various languages. In 2018, he earned approximately $1 million from poetry sales. During that year, he also participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. When COVID-19 hit, Kaur had writer’s block following which she conducted workshops on Instagram. She published her third collection, Home Body, in 2020. The collection, published by Andrews McMeel, includes Kaur’s illustrations and became one of the best-selling books of 2020.
Cover of Rupi Kaur’s third collection, Home Body (2020)
In 2021, she self-produced the first-of-its-kind poetry special Rupi Kaur Live on Amazon Prime Video. Apart from the poetry field, Rupi also made waves in major feminist works. On September 27, 2022, Simon & Schuster published her fourth book, Healing Through Words. In 2023, he wrote an article titled “History shows that Punjab has always fought against tyrants. Modi is no different,” which was published in the Washington Post. That same year, Kaur wrote and narrated an original poem for the short film “Rise” in collaboration with Reese Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine.
Favorite
- Conceptual Artist: Marina Abramovic
- Painters: Amrita Shergil, Frida Kahlo
- Singer: Adele, Beyonce
- Writers/Poets: Bulleh Shah, Sharon Olds, Kahlil Gibran, Nizar Qabbani
Facts/General Knowledge
- In an interview, Rupi told that her father used to write Punjabi poems for her mother in letters when he lived in Japan for some time after their marriage. His mother practiced painting.
- As a child, she had a poor relationship with her mother, who was very conservative. When Rupi 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 did this happen to you?” Obviously, his mother believed these wives’ stories about why menstruation comes early. Whenever Rupi was on my period, her mother would forbid her to go out or ride a bike, and when Rupi would not listen to her, she would say things like, ‘Your mother-in-law is going to hate you,’ No one will marry you!’
- Growing up, she suffered from endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus begins to grow outside the uterus, causing severe pain. She regularly fainted and was constantly picked up by the ambulance at the university as the cysts burst.
- She experienced years of childhood sexual abuse. On several occasions, she discussed the challenging period of her adolescence, and her poems often address the physical and emotional consequences of sexual abuse. However, in an interview he said that his books were not completely autobiographical. He said,
The books are not 100 percent autobiographical. There are – the emotions of it, yes, maybe, but they’re also stories that my sisters or my cousins or my mom or my aunts experience every day. And so I have the ability and privilege to write poems about their experiences.
- He was officially inducted into The City of Brampton’s Arts Walk of Fame. His induction ceremony coincided with the celebration of Sikh Heritage Month in April 2018. During the ceremony, she performed a selection of poems from her second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, at The Rose Theatre.
- She adopted the stage name “Kaur” because it is the common last name of all Sikh women and symbolizes the abolition of the caste system in India. She believed it would be empowering for a young Sikh girl to see her surname in a bookstore.
- Since the Gurmukhi script does not distinguish between lowercase and uppercase, Kaur writes her work entirely in lowercase, using only periods for punctuation. Kaur writes this to respect the Punjabi language.
- In 2020, she was named Writer of the Decade by the American publication The New Republic.
- English singer and songwriter Sam Smith has a tattoo of one of Rupi’s paintings, a human heart with flowers emerging from his book The Sun and Her Flowers (2017).
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn