Synopsis‘…the greatest Indian prose stylist, with the most beautiful sentences.’—Amitav Ghosh, Hindustan Times
Dom Moraes was not only one of India’s greatest poets, he was also an extraordinary journalist and essayist. He could capture effortlessly the essence of the people he met, and in every single profile in this sparkling collection he shows how it is done.
The Dalai Lama laughs with him and Mother Teresa teaches him a lesson in empathy. Moraes could make himself at home with Laloo Prasad Yadav, the man who invented the self-fulfilling controversy, and exchange writerly notes with Sunil Gangopadhyaya. He was Indira Gandhi’s biographer—painting her in defeat, post Emergency, and in triumph, when she returned to power. He tried to fathom the mind of a mysterious ‘super cop’—K.P.S. Gill—and also of Naxalites, dacoits and ganglords.
This collection is literary journalism at its finest—from an observer who saw people and places with the eye of a poet and wrote about them with the precision of a surgeon. .
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Binding: HardBack
About the author
"Dom Moraes, poet, novelist and columnist, is seen as a foundational figure in Indian English Literature. In 1958, at the age of twenty, he won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for his first volume of verse, A Beginning, and went on to publish more than thirty books of prose and poetry. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 1994. He has won awards for journalism and poetry in England, America, and India. He also wrote a large number of film scripts for BBC and ITV covering various countries such as India, Israel, Cuba, and Africa.
Moraes passed away in 2004.
Trained as an architect and city planner, Sarayu Srivatsa was the editor of Indian Architect and Builder Review. Her book, Where the Streets Lead (1997), won the JIIA Award. In 2002 she won the Picador-Outlook non-fiction writing award. Her first novel, The Last Pretence, was longlisted for the Man Asia Award. In 2016 her novel, If You Look For Me, I Am Not Here, was published in the UK, and was on the Guardian list for the Booker Prize."
