‘Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.’
– Plato
With more than eleven volumes of poetry to his credit, Keki N Daruwalla is remembered as one of the most original voices in Indian English poetry. Born on 24 January 1937 in Lahore, Keki Daruwalla was a police officer with a penchant for words and an unusual trove of images that bring to life an enriching assortment of cryptic poetry. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award for his book of poems The Keeper of the Dead in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Landscapes in 1987, Daruwalla was also a writer of short stories and novels. Shortly after the publication of Landfall in 2023, a collection of poems written between 2018 and 2022, he died on 26th September 2024. What strikes one most is the constant use of nature in the titles of his books—Landscapes, A Summer of Tigers, Winter Poems, Landfall, Crossing of Rivers, to name a few.