Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott (Castries, 1930 - 2017) was a poet and playwright from Saint Lucia, a small English-speaking island nation in the Caribbean, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Although he wrote in English, his work became one of the central voices of contemporary Caribbean poetry, and it kept returning to the colonial history of his island.

He was born into a family of English, Dutch and African descent. His father, a civil servant and amateur painter, died when the twin boys were still infants. His mother, a teacher, ran the Methodist school in the town and encouraged her children's creative talents from an early age. Walcott attended the Catholic St. Mary's College and then the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. At nineteen he self-published his first two collections, with the printing costs largely covered by his mother.

After graduating, he moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a critic, teacher and journalist. In 1959 he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which staged many of his early plays. His poetry gained international attention with In a Green Night (1962), and his drama with Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), which won an Obie Award in 1971. He had trained as a painter first, and that visual sensibility shows in the vivid images of his verse.

From 1981 he taught literature and writing at Boston University, where he helped establish the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and he retired in 2007. There he became friends with Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney. His epic poem Omeros (1990) loosely reworks the Iliad in a fishing community in Saint Lucia, and critics regard it as his major achievement. His style pairs a carefully crafted metre with striking visual detail, and his central themes are Caribbean identity after colonialism and the role of the poet in a postcolonial world.

His legacy lies in giving Caribbean writing in English a tradition of wide reach, one that joins European classics with the African, Indigenous and creole voices of the region. He died in 2017 in Saint Lucia.