WALCOTT, DEREK (aka Sir Derek Alton Walcott, 23 January 1930–17 March 2017), a Saint Lucian poet and playwright noted for his powerful works exploring the Caribbean experience and history. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Walcott trained as a painter as a young man but transitioned to the study of writing. As a poet, he was strongly influenced by modernist writers. Walcott’s first poem was published in the Voice of St. Lucia when he was just fourteen years old. He taught at schools in Saint Lucia and Grenada and contributed articles and reviews to periodicals and publications in Trinidad and Jamaica. The production of his plays began in Saint Lucia in 1950. A few years later, from 1958 to 1959, Walcott studied theater in New York City, and thereafter he began to split his time between Trinidad and the United States—residing primarily in the latter. He received many awards, including both a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship, and taught and lectured at Boston University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Yale University.
His best-known works of poetry include those in his 1962 Green Night collection, which celebrate the landscapes of the West Indies while probing it colonial and post-colonial history. His poems often explore themes arising between the Black Antilles and Europe—an experience of fragmentation that, as Walcott has described, poetry attempts to reconstitute in echoes and partial memories of captured language, culture, and customs. Some of Walcott’s other works employ a tenser, more economical style to examine the deep divisions of language and race in the Caribbean; his later works explore his experience as a Black writer in America, estranged from his homeland. Others expand on historical motifs, like his 1993 play The Odyssey, which captures the epic sense of displacement and itinerant heroicism of the colonial and post-colonial Caribbean experience. Of Walcott’s many plays, his best known are perhaps Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), and Pantomime (1978). As with his poetry, Walcott’s plays engage diverse themes of Blackness. When Walcott was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the first US resident of African descent to receive the honor.