Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and a writer on the sacred.
She has been active over the years as poetry editor, anthologist, literary and performing arts critic and curator.
Author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, her recent work includes her latest poetry collection, The Gallery of Upside Down Women, the acclaimed sacred poetry anthology, Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry; a book of essays on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves; and a poetry collection, Love Without a Story.
Described as ‘one of the finest poets writing in India today’ (Keki Daruwalla in The Hindu, 2010), she is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Prize for Poetry 2020 (awarded by India’s national academy of letters). Her recent poetry collection, Love Without a Story (2019), was described as ‘a breathtaking and heartwarming book’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin) and as a book by ‘a unique poet of our times… in a league all by herself’ (Indian Literature). Her book, When God is a Traveller, was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. READ MORE…
Her other poetry awards include the Il Ceppo Prize in Italy, the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Mystic Kalinga Award, the Trinity Arts Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Homi Bhabha and Charles Wallace fellowships.
Widely anthologized and translated, she has been invited to international poetry conferences and festivals in the UK, Italy, Spain, Holland, Turkey, China, West Africa, Israel, Australia and the US, as well as various parts of India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Rumanian.
As prose writer, her books include an acclaimed recent book of essays on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. Other books include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life, The Book of the Buddha (reprinted several times) and Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru).
As editor, her work includes the anthology of sacred female mystic poetry, Wild Women; the much-loved Penguin anthology of Bhakti poetry, Eating God; the Penguin book of sacred journeys, Pilgrim’s India; the Sahitya Akademi anthology of post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, Another Country; and an anthology of love poems, Confronting Love (co-edited with Jerry Pinto).
In 2004, she was invited by the Poetry International Web to be the founder editor of the India Domain of the Poetry International Web, which has grown over the years into a significant web archive of contemporary Indian poetry.
In 1994, she was invited to lead Chauraha, an inter-arts discussion-based forum at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA, Mumbai). She was in charge of this well-known arts hub in the city for over fifteen years. Later, she was also the Head of Indian Dance at the NCPA.
As an independent curator, she created a widely-acclaimed festival of dance and sacred poetry in 2014, entitled Stark Raving Mad. In 2019, she curated another successful festival of music and female mystic poetry, Wild Women, at the NCPA; and the Mystic Kalinga Festival around Bhakti Poetry in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Her most recent festival at the NCPA, in November 2023, was Goddess, a celebration of the Divine Feminine through poetry and the performing arts.
A longstanding journalist on the performing arts and literature, she has been writing since 1989 for various newspapers (including The Times of India, The Hindu, The Indian Express, among others). She has also been columnist on culture and literature for Time Out, Mumbai, The Indian Express and New Woman. She divides her time between New York, Mumbai and Chennai.
newly launched
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides.
Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.
previous books
Wild Women (Penguin [Ebury Press], 2024)
In this anthology of sacred poetry that arrives after the much-loved book, Eating God, Arundhathi Subramaniam weaves together haunting voices of, by and for women across the Indian subcontinent.
Here is a lineage of audacious woman-centred spirituality that traverses the poetry of ancient Buddhist nuns, Bhakti and Sufi mystics, tantrikas and Vedantins. link to reviews of Wild Women
For a complete list of Arundhathi’s books click here
Poetry
Bloodaxe, 2025
(Bloodaxe Books, 2020)
Prose
Anthologies
Arundhathi Subramaniam 