Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was born in Castries, St. Lucia, to a family with African, English, and Dutch ancestry, and began writing poetry as a teenager, self-publishing his first collection at eighteen with money borrowed from his mother. He studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica before moving between the Caribbean and the United States for much of his career.

Walcott's poetry and plays consistently drew on the landscape, history, and creole culture of the Caribbean, blending classical literary forms with the rhythms and textures of island life. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 to develop indigenous Caribbean theatre, and produced a vast body of work spanning poetry collections, plays, and essays over more than five decades.

His 1990 epic poem Omeros, a book-length reimagining of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey relocated to the Caribbean and following St. Lucian fishermen, is widely regarded as his masterwork and one of the most significant long poems of the twentieth century. In 1992, Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for a body of work of "great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." He continued teaching and writing until his death in 2017, having taught for decades at Boston University and other institutions, and remains one of the most celebrated poets the Caribbean has ever produced.