Rupi Kaur

Rupi Kaur is originally from India. Born on 5th October, 1992 to a Sikh family in Punjab, India, Kaur emigrated with her parents to Canada when she just 4 years old.

Her father, who was a truck driver, was in pursuit of his work because of which Kaur’s family had to move around a lot before settling down in Brampton neighborhood in Toronto when she was a teenager. Her passion for art showed up at a young age thanks to her mother.

She began drawing when her mother handed her a paintbrush and asked her to draw her heart out. Inspired by her mother, she continued her artistic journey evolving from drawings and paintings to poems. She used to write poems in school for wishing her friends on their birthday and even messaging her crushes.

Later, at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Kaur studied rhetoric and professional writing. 

In 2009, in the basement of Punjabi Community Health Center in Malton, Kaur’s first performance took place. Her photo-essay on menstruation is among her most notable works. The photo-essay intended to challenge the misunderstandings and taboos surrounding menstruation and is described a piece of visual poetry.

Although Kaur had been writing poetry since long before, she only started sharing her works in 2013 on the popular site Tumblr. Later she expanded her reach by joining Instagram in 2014. Since then, she has been a social media phenomenon. She has adopted the Gurmukhi script in her style of writing. They are written exclusively in lowercase and the period is the only punctuation to be used.    

Kaur first book “Milk and Honey” was self-published on Amazon in 2014. The anthology, split into four chapters, where each chapter takes on a different theme, is a collection of poetry, prose, and hand-drawn illustrations. The book’s popularity, even though self-published, amazed Andrews McMeel Publishing, who later decided to publish a second print in October of 2015.

The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 52 consecutive weeks, which is absolutely jaw-dropping. Selling over a million copies, Milk and Honey’s popularity is still growing and has been translated into over 25 languages.

In July 2017, Kaur announced her second book, “The Sun and Her Flowers” and released it on October 2017. Like “Milk and Honey”, her second book is divided into chapters; five, this time – writing, falling, rooting, rising and blooming. These chapters have their own themes and pictures. Kaur has based this book especially on loss, trauma, femininity, migration and revolution.

Kaur, who started sharing her works from Tumblr and moving on to Instagram, now has millions of followers. However, she was very unsatisfied with Instagram in 2015 for deleting her photo, where she was lying in bed in menstrual blood stains on her sweatpants, because it did not fit their Community Guidelines.

Kaur expressed her dissatisfaction in facebook stating “Thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. You deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines. I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be ok with a small leak when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified, pornified, and treated less than human."

Instagram later apologized after the photo went viral on Facebook.