Born in Bombay, July 19, 1938 of Goan Catholic parents, Dom Moraes is the son of the well-known journalist and editor, Frank Moraes. A prodigy of poetic talent, he began writing poems at the age of twelve and won the Hawthornden Prize when only eighteen.
His early poetry was written between 1958 and 1965. Stephen Spender published Moraes in the “Encounter”. His first anthology is entitled A Beginning. Some of his other collections are John Nobody (1965), Absences (1987) and Collected Poems (1958-1987). Between 1965 and 1982 he wrote hardly any poetry though, as he said, poetry continued to haunt him in sounds or phrases or even single words. There is a distinct change in style in the poetry he wrote after 1982. These poems show greater lucidity and there is plenty of variety in subject, genre, tone and feeling.
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Dom Moraes sees himself essentially as an Indian. What distinguishes him from other Indian poets writing in English is, as Professor S. Nagarajan puts it, “… a powerful organic sensibility, a skillful use of metrical and nonmetrical verse patterns, compressed but still lucid imagery and a remarkable ability to create an unusual mood, atmosphere or an un- nameable emotion”.
Moraes is also noted for his autobiography, My Son’s Father and more recently, An Illustrated Biography of Sunil Gavaskar and Never at Home (1993) a continuation of his first autobiographical piece. For some time he was famous for the Coffee Table Books such as Indira Gandhi (1980) and Gone Away (a record of his travel in India).
He has interspersed his creative writing with non-fictional works like travelogues, reportage and biographies. He lives in Bombay, writes for some of the leading newspapers, and is probably one of the best paid journalists in the country today.