Sujata Bhatt


Sujata Bhatt is an Indian poet, a native speaker of Gujarati.

Life and career

Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and brought up in Pune until 1968, when she immigrated to United States with her family. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa, and for a time was writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize for her first collection Brunizem in 1987.Her poem Search For My Tongue was widely praised by critics around the world. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin. Bhatt was a visiting fellow at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania and currently works as a freelance writer. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets. Combining Gujarati and English, Bhatt writes "Indian-English rather than Anglo-Indian poetry." Her poems have appeared in various journals in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and Canada, and have been widely anthologised, as well as being broadcast on British, German, and Dutch radio. In 2013 she was made Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
Michael Schmidt observed that her "free verse is fast-moving, urgent with narratives, softly spoken. Her cadence is natural, her diction undecorated." Bhatt has been recognized as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry. She is, the New Statesman declared, "one of the finest poets alive". Her poem 'A Different History' dealing with the issues of globalization and westernization, featured in the poetry anthology used for IGCSE English examinations, for examination in 2014. Her poem ‘Search For My Tongue’ is currently being featured in the poetry anthology for IGCSE English examinations.
Bhatt now lives in Bremen, Germany with her husband, the German writer Michael Augustin, and daughter. She is a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.

Poetry collections