Sujatha Bhatt

Biography

Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, in 1956. She grew up in Pune, India, and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and now lives in Germany with her husband and daughter. She is the recipient of various awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Cholmondeley Award.

Her long poem, 'Search for My Tongue', was choreographed by Daksha Sheth and performed in nine cities in England and Scotland, under the title, 'Tongues Untied' by the UK based South Asian Dance Youth Company, in 1994. 'Search For My Tongue' was presented under the same title by the Daksha Sheth Dance Company at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1998.

She has published six collection of poems, including Monkey Shadows (1991) and Augatora (2000), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations; and A Colour for Solitude (2002), which deals exclusively with the life and work of the German painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Her latest collection, Pure Lizard, was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women's Poetry, and has also translated poems by Günter Grass and Günter Kunert. Her translation from the German, Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays & short prose by Michael Augustin, was published in 2007.

Sujata Bhatt has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, and a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. More recently she was Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Archive in London, (www.poetryarchive.org), where more information about her can be found. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. She is a frequent guest at literary festivals throughout the world.