Derek Walcott

(1930 - 2017)

Born in St. Lucia, Derek Walcott once said about the paucity of West Indian poet predecessors, “I can still remember the tremendous elation I had at eighteen, just standing on a little hill somewhere and looking around at the sea and the sky and the town, knowing that nobody had really written about this.” His numerous books of poetry include In a Green Night; Sea Grapes; The Star-Apple Kingdom; and Omeros, a retelling of Homer’s epics. Walcott received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.