Rupi Kaur is a well-known Canadian poet, writer, and illustrator. Her work tends to be popular due to the illustrations she draws to accompany it. Kaur was born in Punjab,India October 5th, 1992 before immigrating with her family to Toronto, Canada in 1996.
Throughout her childhood she used writing and painting to help with transitioning in her new country. As a young adult Kaur chose to go to the University of Waterloo, Ontario and studied Rhetoric and Professional Writing.
Controversy
Kaur is not shy when it comes to controversy and goes as far as embracing it. Kaur first posted a picture of herself within a photo series of her menstrual blood bleeding through her pants and onto her bedsheets. Following the picture being posted on Instagram it was removed twice from her personal page before finally being allowed.
After the posts were removed for “violating [Instagram’s] community standards” Kaur wrote:
“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 apologise 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.”
Kaur further mentions that the point of this photo series was to help break the taboo and stigma towards female menstruation. Other photos within the series include a picture looking down in the shower towards Kaur’s feet with blood around them.
Achievement
Kaur is most well-known for her book “milk and honey,” published in 2015. Kaur’s style of poetry is unique in that all of her work is written only in lower-case letters and she uses just the period for punctuation. Kaur’s book is uniquely broken down into four themed chapters entitled “the hurting”, “the loving”, “the breaking”, and “the healing.”
Kaur’s collection achieved the New York Times bestseller list, and remained on the list consecutively for over twenty-five weeks.
For more information go to Rupi Kaur’s website at https://www.rupikaur.com/