The Insta poet

Rupi Kaur is the phenomenal Instapoet whose success broke all the rules. But, as Natasha Lunn discovers, she’s just getting started

Her poetry has brought her huge success, but Rupi Kaur isn’t done yet

Every so often, a book comes along that seems to have a life of its own, that is passed lovingly from one reader to another with recommendations that insist, “You must read this”. Canadian poet Rupi Kaur’s Milk And Honey is one such book. The poetry collection, originally self-published on Amazon from Kaur’s bedroom in the suburbs of Toronto in November 2014, was so popular that it was picked up by Andrews Mcmeel Publishing for a second print in 2015. It went on to become the biggest-selling poetry book in the UK last year and sold 1.6 million copies worldwide.

The most obvious reason for the book’s word-of-mouth success is Kaur’s potent recipe of social media and poetry. Images of the type-written verses on paper-like backgrounds, often accompanied by her sparse sketches, regularly attract around 130k likes on Instagram. The 24-year-old’s posts are short, charged with energy and very shareable, whether on a phone or on a T-shirt – Prabal Gurung had Kaur’s verse “our backs tell the story no books have the spine to carry” sewn onto the jacket that closed his spring ’17 runway show.

After sharing her work first on Tumblr (in 2013), then Instagram (in 2014), Kaur’s following grew slowly and steadily on the back of her posts and magnetic spokenword performances. Then she was catapulted into the spotlight in 2015 when Instagram removed a self-portrait, in which she was seen lying on a bed with menstrual blood leaking on her pyjamas. Kaur refused to be silenced and posted the image again; for the second time, Instagram removed it. Her response (in her trademark lowercase style), “i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of a misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak. when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified. pornified. and treated less than human.” Instagram later apologised and restored her photograph after outraged headlines across the world, but by then Kaur had gone viral. “It was like being attacked from every angle, not by 100 comments, not by thousands but by hundreds of thousands of voices in every corner of the world, whether it was the Punjabi radio station my mother listens to or the front page of Reddit.”

This activist spirit has been growing inside Kaur since she attended protests with her dad, a truck driver, when she was five years old. Born in Punjab, India, Kaur moved to Toronto aged four and says her immigrant parents “sacrificed their hobbies, their health, everything” for her, her two sisters and brother. Which is one reason why, when she’s writing, she tries to keep in mind “where I have come

I can’t see women SUFFER, I can’t do it. I’m so EMPATHETIC and I have always been that way

from and not to lock those communities out of my journey”. An example of this is her decision to write only in lowercase, using no punctuation other than the full stop, to echo the Gurmukhi script and honour her Sikh culture.

AS WELL AS VIOLENCE AND RACE, LOVE AND LOSS,

Kaur often writes about sexual abuse in her poetry and in a powerful TED spoken-word performance about a sexual assault, although she’s never directly addressed a personal experience. But to try and pin her poems down to moments in her own life would be to miss the point; the pain she describes is universal, to make others nod and say “me too”. She takes women’s suffering and encourages readers to transform it into self-care, resilience – and self-love. As much as her work is about trauma, it is about survival.

Perhaps that’s why Kaur meets fans who tell her they would not be alive without her book, or that it encouraged them to start a safe space for women in their community to talk. “I think change always starts from the ground up,” she says. “So maybe even if you can’t trust your institution, it’s the people who have the power? You do it yourself.”

Another reason Kaur’s words have truly soared on social media is because they are accessible. They let readers in rather than keeping them guessing with double entendres and lofty literary devices. “It’s so much stronger when you’re able to use simple words to create something beautiful that punches you in the stomach, rather than a poem where readers are opening Dictionary.com to find what a word means,” she explains. Kaur is a firm believer that poetry should be for everyone, hence why Milk

And Honey combines narrative prose and verse so there is no escaping its meaning. “Why should we leave it for a high-brow, extremely well-educated society? It should be able to access and go through all communities.”

In person, Kaur is not what you might expect a 24-year-old Instagram sensation to be. She is, by her own admission, “super shy” but speaks with quiet poise and certainty. Our conversation takes place in that strange hinterland between book one and two – when I ask her about writing the latter, she speaks about crying on the phone to her agent with the weariness of someone who has climbed a mountain and is now relieved to be back at ground level again. It’s unsurprising that she feels the weight of anticipation on her shoulders – when she first began writing she did so anonymously, now millions are watching. “It’s debilitating,” she says, when we discuss the pressure of second-book syndrome. “I think it has been one of the biggest challenges of my life actually, this turmoil.”

The new book will include pieces on female foeticide and infanticide. What pulls her to dark issues like these? “I can’t see women suffer, I can’t do it. I’m so empathetic and I have always been that way.”

A part of me was expecting to learn the secrets to Kaur’s Instafame – the best time of day to post, the perfect caption length. But the truth is her rise was not calculated: “It was never tactical… Everything is innate – the way the poems look, the length. I’ve always wanted to create the book that I want to hold. I did it for me.”

Today Kaur holds more of herself back on social media and is protective of what she posts. “I think [social media] can become toxic to the self,” she admits. “I am also that type of person who will read 1,000 nice things and the moment I read one negative thing, it’s the end of the world.” In fact, Kaur now has a team who help monitor her Instagram account and even switched the internet off on her phone for the first three months of the year because being away from it “makes me feel like a person”. She is, above everything else, a contradiction – a private individual who also happens to be an Instagram phenomenon.

And what’s next? Two books and a documentary are to come, and potentially some music, screenwriting, films and photography. But most of all, “I want to see more women follow their dreams. If my work can’t make a girl in the next generation a bigger writer than me, what’s the point?”

Milk And Honey by Rupi Kaur (Andrews Mcmeel Publishing, distributed by Simon & Schuster UK, £9.99)

1.3 MILLION INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS 1.6 MILLION COPIES SOLD 48 WEEKS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST