Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was a poet and playwright from St Lucia, a schoolmaster’s son of mixed descent educated in the British colonial system, who founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and taught at Boston University for two decades. Omeros of 1990, an epic in loose terza rima that gives Homer’s names to the fishermen of his island and walks the poet through Boston, London and Africa, is his major work, and it won him the Nobel Prize in 1992, the first for a Caribbean writer. He painted, wrote some thirty plays, and returned to St Lucia to die. The sea was his subject and English his inheritance, held on his own terms.