Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, on the twenty-third of January 1930, the son of a Bohemian-English father (who died when Walcott was an infant) and a Saint Lucian schoolteacher mother of African and Dutch ancestry. He took his undergraduate degree at the University College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, in 1953 and his initial graduate studies at New York University and Boston University in the early 1960s.

He published his first poetry collection, 25 Poems, at his own expense at eighteen — financed by a loan from his mother that he repaid through Caribbean booksellers within months. His second collection, In a Green Night (1962), and the play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) established him by his early forties as the principal poet-playwright of the English-speaking Caribbean.

He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and led it through the 1960s and 1970s — the principal Caribbean theatrical institution of the period. The Workshop premiered approximately thirty of his plays during his tenure.

His epic poem Omeros (1990) — a fifty-six-chapter epic relocating the Iliad and the Odyssey to twentieth-century Saint Lucian fishing village life, written in modified Dantean terza rima — was the principal late-twentieth-century epic poem in English. It received the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 1991 and was the most-cited work in the Swedish Academy's announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature it awarded Walcott on the eighth of October 1992 — making him the second person of African ancestry to receive the Nobel in Literature after Wole Soyinka (1986).

He taught at Boston University from 1981 to 2007 and as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. He produced over twenty volumes of poetry, more than thirty plays, and several books of essays across his career.

He died at his home in Saint Lucia on the seventeenth of March 2017, age eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the Caribbean Nobel laureate whose Omeros relocated the Western epic to a Saint Lucian fishing village.