PRAISE FOR KEKI N. DARUWALLA

‘It [For Pepper and Christ] is rich, generous and poetic … the bustling of souk and street, of the Red Sea ports and the wharves of Sidon, is conjured so vividly one can smell the incense and taste the salt … Elsewhere it opens out, the sea swells and glitters, maps are talked of rhapsodically and there is a tremendous sense of history blowing on its unstoppable way. Daruwalla moves surely from the grand prospect to the detail, from brutality to tenderness, and the book, as it becomes darker, is still shot through with dazzling colour’ —Anita Mason on For Pepper and Christ, The Warwick Review

‘For Pepper and Christ is indeed an unusual and exceptional first novel’ —Gillian Wright, India Today

‘The Cairo of the time reminds us of one of the novels of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz … Daruwalla’s research is formidable. Each character rings true and captures the moods of the fifteenth century splendidly’ —K. Natwar Singh on For Pepper and Christ

‘He [Daruwalla] has a desperately independent air, as if he was born full-grown from the head of some hitherto unrecognized goddess of poetry … Under Orion is impressive evidence not only of mature poetic talent but of literary stamina, intellectual strength of mind and social awareness’ —Nissim Ezekiel

‘The tension of cynical, skeptical modern outlook given shape through a tightly controlled, somewhat conservative technique makes Daruwalla’s verse unique, like a compact but open metal structure, held together by its bolts and joints, filled with stresses waiting to explode’ —Bruce King

‘… both tough and gentle, virile and receptive. It shows that a man need not be afraid of the woman in him after all and that, yes, verse that is sophisticated need not take away from its power’ —Adil Jussawala on A Summer of Tigers

‘Daruwalla has, from his very first book tended to let the atoms fall here one day and there the next, as Virginia Woolf said about life itself’ —Eunice D’Souza

‘Few Indian English poets have done with, or for, their language, what Keki N. Daruwalla has done … We have here an alert intelligence, a barometer of the severe pressures exerted upon an individual by a predatory culture’ —Ranjit Hoskote

‘Daruwalla has been a force in Indian poetry for far longer than many up and coming novelists in India … Forget watching What Lies Beneath and Gladiator, this is a better way to spend three hours’ —Nilanjana S. Roy on Night River

‘There are poets like W.B. Yeats who keep reinventing themselves all their lives. Their sweep is vast, output prolific since they experiment with diverse forms of poetic expression. Keki Daruwalla belongs to such an illustrious lineage’ —M.S. Nagarajan, Literary Review, The Hindu

‘There is sheer artistry in character portrayals. The nuances of Indian life in different social stratas have been ably presented and the style promises a new ethos in English writing in India’ —A.K. Dutta on Sword and Abyss, India Today

‘Daruwalla loads every rift of his stories with the ore of experience. It is not simply that he has travelled and thought much, it is the experience of writing that gives his stories their weight and paradoxically, their delicacy’ —Shobhana Bhattacharji, The Book Review

‘Daruwalla’s fiction displays an impeccable command over fact and detail. Both engrossing and memorable, it certainly makes for very good reading’ —Makarand Paranjape

‘… one of India’s most gifted short story writers’ —Anushree Majumdar, Indian Express

‘Keki N. Daruwalla is indeed one of the most accomplished poets in India’ —The Pioneer