My Son's Father (An Autobiography)

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Moraes shall be remembered as a poet and, one hopes, as a writer of elegant prose too. His autobiography, My Son's Father, is a masterpiece. -RAMACHANDRA GUHA

Dom Moraes is widely regarded as one of India's greatest poets, and My Son's Father, his account of growing up in Bombay and Oxbridge of the 1950s, published when he was barely thirty, is among the finest autobiographies in modern English literature.

Dom's childhood was as privileged as it was lonely - the environment he grew up in made him think 'Bombay was British'; and missing his father (the celebrated editor Frank Moraes) was his first real memory of him'. It was also a time of conflicted emotions and, frequently, terror, as his beautiful mother, Beryl, sank from neurosis to madness, sometimes smothering her only child with love, and at others subjecting him to bizarre and violent punishments. The result was a deep sense of exile and restlessness, as young Dom sought escape in travel and poetry. Travelling with his father, across India, and to Sri Lanka and Australia, he met a range of famous and fascinating personalities - from the anthropologist Verrier Elwin and poet Nissim Ezekiel, to the iconic writer Stephen Spender. Later, in Britain to study beyond high school, Dom was introduced to Soho and its Bohemian ways, to his first love, and to an intense and doomed relationship. At Oxford, another boyhood hero, the legendary W.H. Auden, came as visiting professor of poetry and read and liked his poems. With this as inspiration, Dom finished his first book of verse, A Beginning, which won him the coveted Hawthornden Prize and made him a literary star at the age of nineteen. He also found another love in Judith and, with the birth of Francis, Dom finally ceased to be his father's son and emerged into adulthood as his own son's father.

‘Like Rimbaud, Moraes gloried in literary fame before he'd sprung out of his prurient teens...and like Robert Graves he had the presumption to set down his memoirs when just 30-to a chorus of literary accolades. --India Today

Dom Moraes (1938–2004), 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, going 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.

**Contents and Sample Pages**