Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright born on January 23, 1930, in Castries, Saint Lucia, then a British colony in the Caribbean. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Walcott was raised in a Methodist family of mixed African and European descent on a predominantly Catholic island. His father, a civil servant and amateur watercolorist, died when Derek and his twin brother Roderick were infants; their mother, a schoolteacher, encouraged the boys' literary and artistic interests. He published his first poem at fourteen and self-published his first collection, 25 Poems, at eighteen with money borrowed from his mother.

After studying at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, he settled in Trinidad in 1959 and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which staged his plays for nearly two decades. His verse drama Dream on Monkey Mountain won an Obie Award in 1971. International recognition for his poetry came with collections including Another Life, The Star-Apple Kingdom, and the book-length Caribbean epic Omeros, published in 1990.

For much of his later life Walcott divided his time between Saint Lucia and the United States, teaching for many years at Boston University. The Swedish Academy cited his work for its luminous fusion of Caribbean experience with European literary tradition. He continued writing poetry, plays, and essays until his death on March 17, 2017, at his home in Cap Estate, Saint Lucia.

The name Derek is a medieval English form of the Germanic name Theodoric, composed of the elements theud meaning people and ric meaning ruler, traditionally interpreted as ruler of the people. He bore this masculine name throughout his literary career.