Writer R Raj Rao on why biographies of living poets are crucial to understanding their work

The poet Keki Daruwalla passed away in Delhi last week at the age of 87 without, we are told, completing his memoirs. In 2023, we lost three major poets, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel and Saleem Peeradina. In 2004, another three significant poets, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar and Dom Moraes died in the same year. Kamala Das left us in 2009, Eunice de Souza in 2017. The first of the poets to take our leave was AK Ramanujan, way back in 1993. Very few poets from the first generation of post-independence Indian-English poets are now in our midst.

Yet, apart from Nissim Ezekiel, whose authorised biography I published in 2000 (reprinted in 2017), none of these poets has had their definitive biographies written during their lifetime. This is truly unfortunate. In the Western literary tradition, almost every major writer has a biography.

A biography of a living poet is by no means easy to write. It requires years of dedicated research, as well as quality time spent with one’s subject to get an insight into their life. It is also imperative upon the biographer to read every single poem and prose piece that their subject has ever written. Ezekiel’s biography took me over five years to research, and another couple of...

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