Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, with a twin brother, Roderick, who also became a playwright. His father, a civil servant and amateur painter, died when the boys were infants; their mother, a schoolteacher, encouraged their reading and paid for the printing of Derek’s first pamphlet of poems when he was eighteen. He trained as a painter alongside his writing, studied at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, and in 1953 moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a critic and teacher and in 1959 founded what became the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.

In a Green Night (1962) brought him wide notice, and his work thereafter held together the islands’ mixed African, European and Asian inheritances without forcing them into a single register. In the plays, notably Dream on Monkey Mountain, he drew on Creole speech, folklore and ritual; in the long autobiographical poem Another Life he set down the making of an artist in a small colony. Omeros (1990), an epic in loose terza rima, transposes Homeric names and wanderings to Saint Lucian fishermen, a wounded villager and a retired British officer.

The Nobel Prize followed two years after Omeros. For more than two decades Walcott taught at Boston University, where he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, while continuing to publish; his late collection White Egrets won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2010. He died at his home on Saint Lucia in 2017 and was given a state funeral.