Sharjah International Book Fair: Canada-based Punjabi poet Rupi Kaur on her rise to fame with the collection Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur talks about coming to terms with fame, controversy, and being a voice for women.

Rupi Kaur’s collection of poems, Milk and Honey, tackles themes of domestic violence, abuse, love and femininity. Photo by Baljit Singh
Powered by automated translation

Run down The New York Times' best-seller list this week, and the usual suspects jockey for top spot. There's a Nicholas Sparks novel, thrillers from David Baldacci, James Patterson and Dan Brown and, of course, ahead of them all, Paula Hawkins's all-conquering The Girl on the Train.

But, almost incredibly, at number three is a debut collection of poetry by a 24-year-old, hitherto unknown Punjabi-Sikh writer based in Canada. No wonder Rupi Kaur has been invited to the Sharjah International Book Fair to talk about how poetry can attract a large audience.

"I know," she says with a giggle. "Everyone tells you, 'No, a book of poetry can't possibly achieve anything like this.' I mean, Milk and Honey is right there alongside novels that are huge movie tie-ins. That's just completely unheard of. It is such a cool thing."

Refreshingly, Kaur is not really talking about her immense personal achievement. She is genuinely delighted that a collection of poems tackling themes of domestic violence, abuse, love and femininity has struck a chord with so many women.

“I’ve had people come up to me to say, ‘This is literally what we’ve been trying to say all our lives but we haven’t found the words. You have.’ You have no idea how good that feels. Truth, honesty, empowerment – it’s what I want for myself and my readers.”

So how did Milk and Honey, a collection initially self-­published in 2014, go so stratospheric? Almost inevitably, it took a perfect storm of social media, controversy and talent for Kaur to achieve such success. She began publishing her poems on Instagram because she wanted to try to find an audience bigger than the 50 people she performed to in Toronto cafes.

“The Instagrams got shared beyond my friends and family, which was surprising in itself, and immediately it seemed to open up a conversation with so many people,” she says. “So I was hooked. I had this group of women going ‘yes, I understand this’ and bouncing ideas off each other. So then I started looking at domestic violence, sexual abuse – topics that I felt affected the women in my community but we weren’t talking about.”

Kaur really hit the headlines last year when Instagram twice removed a picture she'd posted as part of a project exploring taboos surrounding the menstrual cycle. She posted an intelligent but indignant response, her story went viral and, in the end, Instagram backed down. A year later, Kaur thinks the notoriety was a mixed blessing. International news outlets called her a Toronto student rather than a poet, but without the thousands of followers that came her way, she probably wouldn't be on that New York Times best-seller list today.

“Ever since that day I’ve had anxiety,” she says. “I mean, I was pulled into this storm and I had to deal with comments from thousands of people, not all of which were nice. I was doing dozens of interviews a day and it left me feeling very numb – it’s taken a long time to shed that.

“But yes, I do also realise that ever since then, my life has been so busy because it brought so many readers.”

And with that readership comes responsibility. Kaur admits that she feels as if she has become something of a mouthpiece for, firstly, women, secondly, women of colour and, as she puts it, “ever smaller and smaller groups”.

But it has also meant she has had to grapple with the idea of creating work for a target audience – and she actually stopped writing for a while, worried that she wasn’t being “100 per cent honest”.

“Now I’m back in the groove again,” she says with a smile. “There isn’t a lot of representation from someone from my background, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

“For some of my young female readers it will be the first time they will have seen a Punjabi author be successful in the West. Because I’m dealing with topics that aren’t always easily discussed, I know they will look up to me, because I would have done the same. So I just want to make sure I do right by them, wherever this takes me.”

• Rupi Kaur appears at the Sharjah International Book Fair on Friday, November 4. For details, visit www.sharjahbookfair.com

� artslife@thenational.ae