Fame visited the poet Dom Moraes (1938-2004) early, when his first book, which he published at nineteen, won the Hawthornden Prize. He went on to lead a richly diverse life as an international journalist, war correspondent, anthologist and editor. Chosen from the eleven published collections of Moraes’ poetry by the poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, this volume is the essential Moraes.

In the introduction to this first-ever editorial selection of Moraes’ poems, Hoskote proposes a new reading of his career, regarding him as an early but unrecognised transcultural artist. As against the better known Moraes who apprenticed himself to the Romantics, Hoskote emphasises the less familiar Moraes who offered fierce testimony to the twentieth century’s dramas of betrayal, slaughter and heroism.