Professor Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and author of fourteen books of poetry and prose.
Her six books of poetry include Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, When God is a Traveller and Love Without a Story (published by Bloodaxe Books, UK), among others. As editor, her work includes The Penguin Book of Bhakti Poetry, Eating God; and Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English (Sahitya Akademi, 2011). Among her most recent books are The Penguin Anthology of Female Mystic Poetry, Wild Women (2024) and a prose work on contemporary women on spiritual journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves (Speaking Tiger, India, 2021; HarperCollins, USA, 2025).
A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry 2020, and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry 2015, her awards include the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry, the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize, the Il Ceppo Prize in Italy, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Mystic Kalinga Award, the SAARC Literature Award, the ZEE Award for Literature, the Charles Wallace and Homi Bhabha fellowships, among others.
Widely anthologised, her work has been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Italian, German and Spanish. She has presented her poetry at conferences in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, the UK, USA, Italy, Spain, Holland, Turkey, China, West Africa and Israel.
She has worked over the years as a performing arts curator (with the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai), as a literary and performing arts critic, and as poetry editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web.
She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Mumbai (1991), and a Bachelor’s in English from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai (1989). She divides her time between Mumbai, Chennai and New York.
