"Brunizem" won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), an Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and a Cholmondeley Award for Poets, 1991. "Monkey Shadows" received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1991.

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Her's is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.