In 2008, Surani received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship to visit his ancestral homelands, India and East Africa. During this trip, Surani wrote "Kilimanjaro Journal" and the poem "Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real," which won the Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize in 2010. That award's jury citation states that the poem "dramatizes the tension between the world of the collective myth and poetic imagination on the one hand and individual experience and empirical decision on the other."
