New Delhi, Oct. 2 -- The 87-year-old poet and former IPS officer Keki N. Daruwalla passed away on the night of 26 September at a Delhi hospital after a prolonged period of illness. The author of over a dozen works of poetry and fiction from the 1970s onwards, Daruwalla was considered one of the greatest English-language poets of India. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987 and the Padma Shri (India's fourth-highest civilian honour) in 2014. Following a stint as an intelligence officer at R&AW in the early 1990s, Daruwalla retired from the police force and later served as a member of the National Commission for Minorities between 2011 and 2014.

From the beginning of his literary career, Da...