Poets in (and from) Goa

Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English, Ashoka University and a Ph.D. (University of Sussex), talks about Father Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit, who not only would "spend his entire life in Goa, he also wrote the first Konkani grammar book and an epic 11,000-line Marathi poem, now regarded as a classic."[1]

Eunice de Souza, herself a prominent poet in English, writes:[2] "Joseph Furtado, who wrote in English and in Portuguese was one of the first poets to use what we now call “Indian English.” “Fortune teller, memsahib!/Tell fortune very well…/” There’s the great modernist, F N Souza. And we are probably the only people in the world to write an ode to sorpotel! In addition, poets such as the late Santan Rodrigues, Melanie Silgardo, and Raul da Gama Rose played an important role in poetry in English in the 1970s. They started a poets’ cooperative named Newground and published some volumes of poetry. Melanie, who has been living in London for some years recently co-edited with me an anthology called These My Words, The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry which includes translations of poems in all Indian languages, and poems in English."

Augusto Pinto, reviewer, writes of Joseph "Furtado, who passed away in 1947 at the age of 75, was one of the finest Indian English poets of his time" in a detailed article in the Himal magazine, published from Kathmandu[3]

Peter Nazareth, the editor of the first anthology in English of Goan writing, comments:[4] "I found some of the literature very strange, particularly poetry written before the fifties. The subjects seemed hopelessly romantic, the treatment archaic, the psyche concerned with the irrelevant. Was it just because I was out of touch? Or was it that being involved with the exciting, creative, literature of a whole continent, Africa, my responses were sound: that Goan writers were trapped in a deep, airless well?"

Goa Today, the monthly magazine from the region, has an article[5] on Goan poets in English.

• Bakibab Borkar
• RV Pandit
• Uday Bhembre [6]
• Veni Madhav Borkar
• Ramesh Veluskar[7]
• Shashikant Punaji[8][9]
• John Aguiar

• Fr. Vasco do Rego SJ, known for his flawless metre and rhyme and beauty of language.
• Walter Menezes [10]

• Joseph Furtado
• Dom Moraes
• Armando Menezes
• Leslie de Noronha
• Santan Rodrigues
• Manuel Rodrigues
• Eunice De Souza
• Innocent Sousa
• Antonio Gomes[11]
• Jerry Pinto
• Manohar Shetty
• Tony Fernandes[12]
• Margaret Mascarenhas
• António Mascarenhas
• Frederika Menezes
• Rochelle Potkar
• Gerson da Cunha
• Mark Rocha[13]

• Vishnu Wagh

• Nascimento Mendonça (1884–1927) [14][15]
• Orlando da Costa
• Paulino Dias (1874–1919)
• Adeodato Barreto (1905-1937)
• Floriano Barreto (1877–1905)
• Prof. Laxmanrao Sardessai
• Ananta Rau Sar Dessai
• Judit Beatriz de Souza[16](1933–2011)
• Vimala Devi (1936)
• Jose Filipe Neri Soares Rebelo
• Telo Mascarenhas
• Oscar Monteiro[17][18][19][20]