Arundhathi Subramaniam Readings
'These beautiful poems have that quality of being breathed into the world that always means that deep experience went into them. The spirituality here is so light, so witty, so spontaneous, so open to the unknown, so open to the life of the mind, so generous, so visceral, how did it come to be so…heavy a topic in the West? How did it come to be a topic at all?' – Dennis Nurkse, on The Gallery of Upside Down Women
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Her fourth book from Bloodaxe, The Gallery of Upside Down Women, was published in March 2025. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, the poems in The Gallery of Upside Down Women 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.
Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and previous books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won both the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.
Arundhathi Subramaniam's poem 'This Fruit’ from The Gallery of Upside Down Women was Highly Commended by the Judges of the Forward Prizes 2025.
An excellent review of The Gallery of Upside Down Women was included in the January 2026 issue of World Literature Today. Available in full online here.
'... The Gallery of Upside Down Women represents a new installment in the poet’s “fascination with women on sacred journeys” and confirms her reputation as one of India’s foremost poets. [...] Drawing on spiritual research to cast a sharp glance at the present world, The Gallery of Upside Down Women shows throughout a masterful comfort in the use of poetic language and technique, which in turn allows Subramaniam to handle her subjects with critical elegance and style.' – Graziano Krätli, World Literature Today
A conversation between Graziano Krätli and Arundhathi Subramaniam was featured on the World Literature Today blog on 18 November 2024. They were discussing devotional Indian poetry (bhakti). Read online here.
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The Bloodaxe edition of The Gallery of Upside Down Women is distributed in the US by Consortium Book Sales. An Indian edition was published by Penguin Random House India in July 2025.
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PAST EVENTS
Online launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts & Arundhathi Subramaniam - Tuesday 25 March 2025
Bloodaxe's online launch event for Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts and Arundhathi Subramaniam was livestreamed on 25 March 2025 and is now on YouTube. All three poets were celebrating the publication of their new poetry books by reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Gwyneth, Kate and Arundhathi joined the event live from Cardiff, Stroud and New York (via India). Their excellent readings were followed by a fascinating discussion around the shared themes in their work.
Arundhathi Subramaniam live at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2016
Arundhathi Subramaniam reads and introduces a selection of poems from her two Bloodaxe titles, When God Is a Traveller and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems: ‘How Some Hindus Find ‘Their Personal Gods’’, My Friends’, ‘Winter, Delhi, 1997’, ‘Madras, November, 1995’, ‘Home’, ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’, ‘I Speak for Those with Orange Lunchboxes’, ‘Or Take Mrs Salim Sheikh’, ‘Where the Script Ends’ and ‘Prayer’. This video shows part of the reading she gave at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 8 July 2016 following an interview with Maitreyabandu.
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A Sheaf Poetry Festival interview with Arundhathi Subramaniam can be read here.
A review of Love Without a Story along with the poem 'Mitti' are featured in Inkroci magazine. Both have been translated into Italian by Andrea Sirotti, who has also translated Jane Hirshfield (see reading above).
'To read Love Without a Story is to be in the presence of a poet who is capable of rendering the physical and the everyday with a sort of sensual plenitude whilst at the same time exploring connections outwards onto more transcendental, sometimes mythical planes...' - Tom Phillips, Inkroci Magazine
Read the review here.
Read the poem here.
[05 November 2020]
