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.
FORTHCOMING ONLINE EVENT
Saturday 22 November 2025, 2-3pm, Push the Boat Out
Online Double Bill: Between the Historical and the Imaginary
Arundhathi Subramaniam and Vidyan Ravinthiran will be taking part in an online event for Push the Boat Out in Edinburgh. They will be joining the event from India and the USA.
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s third collection Avidyā, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, these poems remember events that have otherwise been erased. Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems in The Gallery of Upside Down Women also map a world trying to find its axis in a season of change. Wandering through these pages though are extraordinary women, who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant.
Join these two poets online as they read from and discuss their luminous latest collections, the forgotten histories they dissect and the new worlds they point towards.
Tickets: £0-15.
Booking: https://pushtheboatout.org/events/online-double-bill-between-the-historical-and-the-imaginary/
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]
