Sujata Bhatt was born in 1956 and grew up in Pune but emigrated with her family to the United States in 1968. She studied there and received an MaFA from the University of Iowa and went on to be writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Bremen, Germany. Her first collection of poems, Brunizem, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia). In 1991 she received a Cholmondeley Award. For Bhatt, language is synonymous with the tongue, the physical act of speaking. She has described Gujarati and the Indian childhood it connects her to as “the deepest layer of my identity”. However, English has become the language she speaks every day and which she, largely, chooses to write in. The complex status of English – its beauties and colonial implications – are also conveyed in some of her poems.