Dom Moraes, one of India's leading literary figures - an author, poet, columnist and former journalist - died yesterday after a heart attack, news reports said. He was 66.

Moraes died in his sleep in his apartment in his hometown of Bombay, the Press Trust of India reported. Moraes was also suffering from cancer.

Born in 1938, Moraes began writing poems at 12. The renowned British poet WH Auden admired some of Moraes' earliest work.

His first book of poems, A Beginning, was published by London's Parton Press when he was 19. It won the Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the imagination in 1958. Moraes was the first non-English person to win the prize.

Moraes' father, Frank Moraes, was also a famous figure in India, an editor and author who took his son on his extensive travels through Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and south-east Asia, shaping his son's creative imagination. For eight years he lived in London with his father, who had gone there "to die," as Dom Moraes said in a recent book, Out of God's Oven.

The skies of London were "unfamiliar to him," but when he returned, India too remained a puzzle, Moraes said in his book.

He wrote that he had an impression of three Indias: one that was in the cities, which he disliked, another in the villages: "I pitied it and wanted to love it, but it puzzled me." The other India did not exist for him any longer "and perhaps never had but might have been beautiful if and when it did. But I still didn't feel I belonged to any of them."

Over a five-decade career, he published almost 30 books, edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York; worked as a journalist in several countries, and for the United Nations.

He also scripted more than 20 television documentaries from England, India, Cuba and Israel for the BBC and ITV.
Associated Press