Popstar of poetry: "Insta-poet" Rupi Kaur is at the forefront of a movement embodying short, raw verse, with arbitrary line-breaks and quick, often gut-punch-packing compositions.

Rupi Kaur, 24, is known to propel herself into spaces that weren't conventionally designed for her. And dominate them. It's not every day, for example, that a 22-year-old college student posts a picture of menstrual stains, only to have to wage war against the social media site which takes it down ("I will not apologise for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society," she wrote back then. Her follower count grew sevenfold). It's not every day, that a girl from a pind in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, finds herself on a New York Times Bestsellers List, selling 1.4 million copies of her first book. And it's not every day that a young, powerful voice of colour resonates the way Kaur's does-whether for good or bad-across the world.

The insta-poet is known for her short, raw verse, with arbitrary line-breaks and quick, often gut-punch-packing poetry, dealing with subjects such as immigration, humanity, abuse, rape, alcoholism and feminism. [Our backs/tell stories/no books/have the spine to/carry]. Criticised (and often ridiculed) for shooting to fame for what is perceived to be "easy", Kaur is not unaware of the comments that flood her timelines. "It's like contemporary art. When it became a movement, people would see a painting with just one dot on it and get annoyed and say, this is unfair, I could do this." Kaur's process is different for spoken...