Dom Moraes—Chiseling the stone to bring out undying beauty siasat.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from siasat.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The writer is an author.
AFTER spotting a reference to the poet Dom Moraes in my article on Ved Mehta, a thoughtful reader wrote to tell me that he owned a copy of Dom’s first book The Grass is Greener (1951). It was published when he was only 13 years old. Its subject was not poetry, for which he later became world famous, but cricket.
Its frayed dust jacket describes him as possessing “an amazing precocity”. Curiously, Dom never mentions it in any of his autobiographies, except in a casual aside in Never At Home (1996).
At the age of 12, Dom received his first prize as the best commentator in a cricket match between the Commonwealth XI and India XI in 1950-51. At the age of 18, while still at Oxford, he won the more coveted Hawthornden Prize for his slim anthology of poems A Beginning (1961).