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At the age of nineteen, Dom Moraes achieved instant fame as a poet with his first book of verse, A Beginning, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1957. Since then he has published nine more collections of poems, including Serendip which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994. The lyrical beauty and technical virtuosity that are the hallmarks of his poetry have enthralled readers for almost five decades, drawing them into a mesmerizing world of passion, romance, fear, grief, death and renewal. Characterized by an elegant and hypnotic imagery, the surreal texture of his poems weave together a variety of themes—love and war, friendship and alienation, myth and religion. In addition to all the verse he has ever published in his distinguished career spanning fifty years, Collected Poems 1954-2004 contains a long new sequence and several other poems hitherto unpublished.