By Tristram Fane Saunders | Britain | The Telegraph |
Here’s a fact that would have sounded wildly unlikely a decade ago: the most popular and influential poet writing in English today is an Indian-Canadian truck driver’s daughter who self-published her first collection at just 21.
Few books this century have changed the publishing landscape as much as Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (2014). In commercial terms, Kaur’s impact on poetry bears comparison with JK Rowling’s impact on children’s writing.
One week in 2021, for instance, three out of the top six books in the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback fiction weren’t fiction at all – they were Kaur’s three poetry collections. It’s hard to overstate how rare this kind of success is. The average poet would be lucky to sell a thousand copies of their debut. Milk and Honey has sold over six million.
Obviously, it’s not quite what Kaur had expected when she first started performing her poems to crowds she could count on her fingers and toes as a “terrified” 17-year-old, she tells me. She’s speaking over Zoom from Montreal, where she’s in town for the One Young World Summit.
Now 31, revisiting Milk and Honey for an expanded 10th-anniversary edition, she’s been reflecting on what it was like to suddenly find millions of people reading her stark, confessional poems about abuse and toxic relationships.
“It was overwhelming,” she says. “I feel like I disassociated quite a bit. When people at book signings would open it up to a poem about sexual assault and point at it and say ‘this is my favourite piece, this is why I love this book,’ it would hit me in the face. I’d get a bit anxious like, oh my God, that’s out there in the world? That’s freaking me out.”
The other big shift is one of genre: Kaur is the queen of “Instapoetry”, a portmanteau of “poetry” and “Instagram”, where many of today’s most popular poets build their audience by self-publishing. The lucky ones are picked up by Kaur’s press, Andrews McMeel. An outfit previously best known for printing calendars and comic strips, it spotted Milk and Honey when the self-published volume was selling in the tens of thousands, and cannily snapped up the rights for a trade edition; in many bookshops, you’re more likely to see Andrews McMeel than Penguin or Faber on the poetry shelf.
Fame has brought the difficult decisions that come with being a public figure. In November 2023, Kaur was invited by Kamala Harris to a Diwali party at the White House – an event she saw as wildly insensitive, given the ongoing war in Gaza. “How can we celebrate defeating darkness with light when this is happening in the world?” She refused, as she strongly disagreed with Harris’s stance toward Israel and Palestine. “If I were invited to the same event again, I would say no whether [Harris] was VP or president.” Still, she believes that “Over Trump, we need her to become president.”
Kaur was born in Punjab, India, in 1992. Her father moved to Canada when she was a baby, the rest of the family following a few years later. She and her siblings grew up in a one-bedroom basement flat in Brampton, Ontario. “My mum has four kids – I’m the oldest of four – and she’s still sad that none of us are doctors,” she says, with a comic eye-roll, but adds that they’re “really proud”.
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