Comprises an autograph manuscript notebook containing many drafts of poems by Dom Moraes, probably to be dated ca. 1963.
Pencilled pagination 1-80 has been added on each page throughout the notebook, which is written from both ends. Dom Moraes has written his name and London address on the inside front cover, and has added the note 'Please return if found'. The notebook has a bright red outside cover and every page has ruled lines.
Dominic Francis (Dom) Moraes, the Indian poet and writer, was born in Bombay on 19 July 1938, the only child of the editor and author Frank Moraes and his Roman Catholic wife. As a child, Dom travelled with his father throughout South-East Asia and Australasia and began to write poetry at the age of twelve. He went to England in 1954 and became a student at Jesus College, Oxford. He published his first book of poems, 'A Beginning', while he was there, and with it became the first non-English and the youngest person to win the Hawthornden Prize for poetry in 1957. His second book of verse, 'Poems' (1960), became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society. Apart from these, he published eight other collections of poems, the last being his 'Collected Poems' (1987), and twenty-three prose books, including a biography of Mrs Gandhi and his memoirs, 'Never at Home' and 'My Son's Father'. He edited magazines in London, Hong Kong, and New York, was a correspondent in various wars, and served as an official of a United Nations agency. He also scripted and directed over twenty television documentaries for the BBC and ITV. He returned to India in 1979 and lived in Mumbai until his death on 2 June 2004.
Access to this material is unrestricted.
