‘chronicles of entering my body’ has been shortlisted in the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. This prize is a literary honor in India conferred annually to published works of Indian authors (residing in India or abroad) in novel, short stories, poetry and drama.

Rupam Baoni’s poetry touches deep into the realm of primordial sensuality, celebrating the reverence for humanity, the precision of an organism and its functions. It’s an ode to the human body, where the metaphysical is forever tethered to the earthly, inseparable from our primal urges and fertility. A profound journey into the fascinating feminine.

— Tagore Prize

The post finalist in Rabindranath Tagore Prize 2023 appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

The poem ‘my language was my mother’ from Rupam’s forthcoming collection ‘decolonising the broken heart’ was published in Wasafiri (Issue 123, Autumn 2025).

Here Rupam Baoni mourns her mother tongue (‘there’s parts taken away/one-by-one-by-one from her, from//me too when she goes’)

– from Sana Goyal’s Editorial ‘Red Matter, White Page’.

Wasafiri
Volume 40, 2025

The post my language was my mother appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

a collection of essays

Rupam Baoni’s essay “Limbs, Torsos, Gains, Losses, and the
Art of Chiaroscuro” appears in the volume of essays
Conundrums of Depiction, Reception and Witnessing in Art, Literature and Cinema
Edited by Pradipta Mukherjee
Published: Pencraft International September 2025

This volume brings together a set of interdisciplinary engagements that traverse historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and political terrains. The essays examine how forms of artistic and narrative expression attempt to capture – or resist capturing – reality, trauma, memory, identity, and emotion.

Pradipta Mukherjee

read the essay

buy the book

The post Conundrums of Depiction, Reception and Witnessing in Art, Literature and Cinema appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

‘unripe fruit at the window’ is a full-length book of poems and artworks (a Red River Publication) by Rupam Baoni.

The post unripe fruit at the window – COMING SOON! appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

Rupam co-judged with Timothy Green an international ekphrastic poetry competition inspired by her painting ‘lyrical abstraction’ published in the Rattle magazine, October 2025.

M.F. Drummy, 'Ageless'

The post Judge at the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2025 appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

This painting, in its nascent stage, had nothing much to do with the now because like us all it was birthed in the non-Covid-19 era but precipitously found itself pummelled into the thick of it all – one of the greatest human crises the world has seen. Unlike all my other works this one has moved at a snail’s pace, slow, ever so slow owing to the many distractions that happened along the way, throwing its completion off course. On the 17th of October 2019 I first put brush to canvas without the faintest idea of where I was headed and where the journey would take me. I knew it would be something to do with the clutter of buildings, a hodgepodge of architecture comprising an aerial view of an old city turned or trying to turn modern. The sky always determines what happens to the world below, in light, in shade, in character, my Dad/Guru has always said to me and this is what sets the tone to all my works, however abstract my journey might seem or be – and it took me nearly three weeks to work on the sky. When something is just not right after finishing for the day there is that constant sense of restiveness midst all other work. I didn’t know what my inner eye was actually seeking and how the outer ones would comply. Every evening I would head to my studio after a long day of writing and allow my intuition to take over. I had no idea where I was headed but over years of work, whether in writing, painting, sculpture, I’ve somehow learned to trust my instinct. There is nothing that tells me a work is done until it actually is and though I have tried to endlessly analyse my process, this particular area, or blind spot always remains a riddle to me. I like it this way. It is what gives to me that thrill – of the end line being a constant blur – until the epiphanic moment startles me and I find myself on the other side of the work.

The start and finish of this painting saw many detours, many travels – momentous ones really. I found myself in India for a month to see to Dad’s rapidly declining health issues; and after getting back from there it was Durham, then Wakefield, then Cornwall, then back to the London streets that were by now recoiling at the daily news from Wuhan and how that deathly, previously unheard of virus was spreading like wildfire, hurtling across borders, rampaging nations, taking the lives of thousands even in this day and age of highly-advanced medical know-how (by 25th of February, there was talk of thirteen discoverable cases in the UK). The painting seemed to move at a snail’s pace, just an inch forward or sometimes not even that despite the two or more hours I spent in the studio almost every evening (after a long day of writing) with sometimes a little swab of colour here or a dab there, whilst other times simply sitting back and staring agitatedly for the secrets hidden in there to present themselves to me. The artificial light from the windows against the natural twilight had to be just the right tone, hue, sharpness, angle as it sluiced the other structures or the air around. Beside these technicalities and the fine-tuning, I knew there was that other arcane place I was headed for but had no idea what or where that might be. There came a point on the 21st of March, late night, when I knew there was nothing more needed to be done to the conglomeration of structures and that the light, shade, skies were just as they were meant to be. Yes, it was all out there, emerging from that duskiness – this world I had envisaged in those lived-in homes nestled upon my canvas, their lights twinkling and night gaining in but now, behind those orange windows out there too, news blared the rise of the corona virus cases (recorded to 5018 in the UK, deaths to about 233 and then within the next couple of days the numbers shooting up to 9529 and 508 whilst the statistics world over showed an ominous 416,680 people infected and 18,651deaths). My painting was finished but it was not complete.

It was in limbo, that typical little town living upon the canvas back there in my studio in the bottom of the garden– too unspoiled to be true – or perhaps presaging that state of mayhem in the offing. I carried the visual around with me everywhere. There were shapes and movements I was seeing all the time and which drew me back to my studio earlier than usual the following day. This, as in many of my other works is what I call the death-dance moment. It is that precarious point I stand upon when I have to do what my inner eye urges and I know that I will either destroy a work completely or perhaps redeem it, give to it its truer meaning. It is a huge risk and a painful, daunting moment too because there is this world before you that you have created over months of painstaking labour, pristine and beautiful. You can leave it at that and just go away but somehow you can’t. And you don’t. All you do see is that massive tube of Prussian-Blue (because there are no blacks in nature – at least you don’t think so), your palette knife and your hand swirling and dancing about manically before you.

You’ve heard it all your life – the tales of industrial eyesores taking over the world, the network of poles, the cables, the wiring, the cross-wiring that spoils the vistas everywhere. You’ve grown up thinking, knowing that the world would be visually a more beautiful place without them, more organic. Perhaps it would, yet something has changed over the years and we with them. Things shift, evolve and we cannot but move along with them or the world falls out of step with us. We might not want things to be in such and such a manner but we still need them to be so; and we realise their need all the more when certain catastrophes set in. We realise that the very sights that once irked us, redeem us today, are our saviours. To slash all over onto my finished canvas these marks, these poles, cables, cords of dissonance was an act of heartbreak for me; but somehow it had to be done. I emerged from the studio after an hour of work, drained of energy, my limbs aching, flushed with that feverishness of completion; and of emotional depletion. I had disfigured the perfect world I had spent months creating – but wasn’t that what was really happening to my own world around me?

A couple of days later I was to learn that I too was among the 25,000 odd infected names out here in the UK. The three week quarantine soon after and moments of reflection made me realise that those poles and cables which my hands had vehemently slashed across the canvas, the haiku that I had written down immediately after was the life I was to live for not just that month of compromised lung capacity and breathing, the aches, pains and malaise – and yes, lockdown, complete lockdown – but one the whole world would soon be living within the confines of their homes, connecting virtually with their loved ones and the cords and ropes of technology would actually be the only road to freedom from their incarceration. Strange times these.

the blacks rise like walls

about us everywhere; it’s

strange how the cords that

roped our spirits once are our

roads to liberation now

*

Acrylic on Canvas / 21st March 2020

Acrylic on Canvas / 25th March 2020

(Today, the confirmed Covid 19 cases around the world are 5,341,424 and the number of deaths has gone up to 341,067.

In UK alone there are 254,195 confirmed cases and 36,393 deaths so far.)

* * *

The post Poles, Cables, Pandemic & Prussian Blue appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

ISSUE 1/ JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2025

Four artworks accompanied by their respective ekphrastic haiku poems featured in the January-February 2025 Issue of ‘The Riveraine Muse’.

see pdf of the post

The post four artworks and poems in ‘The Riveraine Muse’ appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

I am drawn to an expressionist and lyrically abstract approach of articulating with colour and form. Painting is like poetry or music for me and I love the emotive power of colour and of gestural hand movements in capturing the spirit and rhythm of a thing or moment. The simple and astonishing effects of watercolour on paper are satori experiences for me that I can best encapsulate in haiku/tanka poems, which capture the essence of my otherwise untitled paintings. Both my poems and paintings share a deep and symbiotic connection with each other and though they are stand-alone in themselves, they also complete the work as a composite whole. Together they complement their other half in rhythm, movement, colour, expression, while at the same time tugging at the unseen, intuitive self within, before manifesting into the final painting/poem form.

Rupam Baoni
Writer and artist
London

The post ‘Sacred Art Space’ International Art exhibition appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

‘chronicles of entering my body’ is an exploration of love, grief and relationships through poetry and painting. Rupam Baoni’s striking voice deconstructs notions of emotional and bodily experiences, keeping her examinations in parallel with Nature. This is Rupam’s second collection, featuring poems that have recently been shortlisted in the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing and Bridport Prizes, and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition.

trailer

These thirty poems erupt and dance into our consciousness, sequenced within five chapters – each with one of the author’s own paintings at its mouth: chronicles of entering my body, love is a one-dimensional word, silence is the loudest word, dragon wisdom and vitruvian woman.

Two more paintings accompany the opening and closing content of the book. The title poem, also represented as a chapter title, comes to us with its remarkable lines and questions such as:’I’m made of fire now and you’re wind; but still, tell me the chronicles of your entering my body, tell me how your entering is silent as non-entering in all its entirety’. Such profound and philosophical inquiries continue through the collection along with explorations of the body and the natural world. One’s journey through the work brings encounters with love, manifestations of grief, tightrope walkers, the vulnerability of flesh, dementia, the bonds between mothers and daughters, Beethoven’s symphonies, prayers to the earth and more. The book culminates in a long seven-part poem as the final chapter, ‘vitruvian woman’ inspired by da vinci’s ‘vitruvian man’ and the Indian philosophy of the seven chakras in our body and how each one opens the physical/spiritual doorways to different facets of human needs, desires and understanding before the final passing.

buy the book

The post chronicles of entering my body appeared first on Rupam Baoni.

Rupam Baoni’s first poetry collection, ‘Green, Red & Amber’ was published at the age of nineteen. This prompted her to be invited as youngest of twenty-one international poets and writers to a seminar on ‘Poetry and Prose: The Lively American Arts’ organised by the U.S, Information Service to prose and poetry readings alongside the US Poet Laureate Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Dr Tim Hansen, Jayant Mahapatra among others.

order it here

LOVE

Who says that love’s blind?
I saw you at the railings
with your hands
stuffed in your pockets
awkwardly
and your speech faltered;
your faults glared at me,
I saw the chipped tooth
marring your looks
…and still I loved you.

~~

STRANGER

I’ve known you for years
now; these roads narrowed and
clattering structures sprang up
in our knowing; we moulted
our innocence together and
gravelled paths replaced the
daisy-strewn ones; still there’s
the wood-screen between and
every time you become
stranger and stranger.

~~

The post Green, Red and Amber appeared first on Rupam Baoni.