Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet and author, who has written about culture and spirituality. She was born in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, South India.

Life and career Subramaniam is a poet and writer based in Mumbai. She is the author of 13 books of poetry and prose.

She has received the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women's Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships.

Her volume of poetry When God Is a Traveller was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2015, and won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the year 2020.

Her poetry has been published in Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Poets (Penguin India); Sixty Indian Poets (Penguin India), Both Sides of the Sky (National Book Trust, India), We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi), Fulcrum No 4: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK), Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (United States), The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India, featuring 151 Indian English poets, edited by Vivekanand Jha and published by Hidden Brook Press, Canada, and Atlas: New Writing (Crossword/ Aark Arts).

She has worked as Head of Dance and Chauraha (an inter-arts forum) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, and has been Editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web.

Awards On 25 January 2015, Subramaniam won the first Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for her poetry work When God Is a Traveller.

On 22 December 2017, Subramaniam won the first Mystic Kalinga Literary Award, announced during the Kalinga Literary Festival.

She won the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2020 for When God Is a Traveller.