Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. She has published three books of poetry in the UK with Bloodaxe: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with new work; When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry (awarded by India’s national academy of letters), the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy; and Love Without a Story (2020). Her fourth book from Bloodaxe, The Gallery of Upside Down Women, is published in 2025.
Her recent work includes Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Four Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys (Harper Collins, US, 2025) and Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry (Penguin Books India, 2024). Previous books include The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and the biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), as well as Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin, 2014).
In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at London’s Southbank Centre in 2015.
She mostly lives in Mumbai, Chennai and New York.
Author photo: Meetash Taneja
