Her maternal grandparents were lower-caste shudras and her father came from a landless family. Her parents' anti-caste activism gave Kandasamy a deep understanding of the caste and gender inequalities that fracture our society, and her writing is soaked in it. Her debut collection of poems, Touch (2006), for example, was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second collection, Ms Militancy (2010), was "an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths."

Described by The Guardian as "one of fiction's most fiery and unclassifiable polemicists", Kandasamy was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2022, and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work. Here, she writes about the magic and mayhem of being a woman writer.

Looking back after nearly a quarter century, with the benefit of both hindsight and nostalgia, I think the decision to become a writer was the most courageous thing I have ever done. Writing came from some loves (the passion for the written word, the almost-naive commie belief that ideas can change the world, my teenage admiration for the utterly broken, glamorous lives of artists). Writing also came from absent futures, as a creative response to constraints, to the realisation that I could not choose the revolutionary life, could not be a guerrilla somewhere, could not organise people by the thousands. Writing happened because I was a girl with very strong opinions. Writing also happened because I was helpless to the news-cycle around me—the late 1990s was a time of radical liberation movements in some parts of the sub-continent on the one hand, and of extreme mass violence against dalits; massacres like Melavalavu, Bathani Tola and Laxmanpur Bathe were the headlines we would wake up to.