Overview
'Brunizem' is a dark prairie soil found in Asia, Europe and North America, the three worlds of Sujata Bhatt's imagination. Born in India, her mother tongue Gujarati, Bhatt was educated in the United States and now lives in Germany. In Brunizem, her acclaimed first collection, she explores the richness and the conflicts of moving between cultures and languages, in poems that are passionate, direct and eloquent. Brunizem was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. In 1994 'Search for My Tongue' was choreographed by Daksha Sheth and performed by the UK-based South Asian Dance Youth Company in nine cities in England and Scotland, under the title 'Tongues Untied'.Author Biography
Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published six collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, Brunizem (1988). Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (PBS recommendation, 1991), The Stinking Rose (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (PBS Recommendation, 2000), and A Colour for Solitude (2002). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry, and has translated poems by Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin (Dedalus Press, 2007). She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Currently, Sujata Bhatt lives in Germany with her husband and daughter.
