About the Author

Dr. Rukhaya Mohammad Kunhi from the PG Department of English, Nehru College Kanhangad is a poet/ critic/ speaker. A award-winning writer, she has published her works national and international anthologies and journals. Her debut poetry collection Lost Canvas published with Red River has been well-received by literary critics and readers. Her poems have been translated into German, Malayalam, Marathi and Kannada. 

She has won accolades in writing including ones from the New Book Society of India, Storymirror.com and the Forgotten Writers’ Foundation, Egypt. She was listed as Yahoo Voices Top 1000 internationally for the years 2011,2012 and 2013. Rukhaya is the recipient of the Reuel International Prize for Criticism 2016, for the most promising upcoming critic. In 2016, she was listed as IWI’s Incredible Women Writers of India.

She was catalogued among the best late Indian 20th century essayists like Arun Shourie, M.J. Akbar, Pankaj Mishra , Arundhati Roy, Amit Chaudhuri, A.K. Ramanujan, etc by the Humanities Institute, USA.

In 2020, she was awarded the Women-Empowered India (WE) Gifted Poet award: Powerful Emergent Voice. In 2021, she was awarded the Reuel International Prize for Poetry. In 2022, Rukhaya was listed among 100 Inspiring Muslim Women of Kerala, as part of Rising Beyond The Ceiling, a global initiative. In 2025, she was endowed with the Samam Mahila Ratnam Woman Empowerment Award instituted by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Govt. of Kerala in collaboration with Kasaragod District Panchayath.

A university rank-holder, she completed her PhD from the Central University of Kerala under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Koyippally on the topic ‘The Poetics of Diaspora in Robert Frost.’