Derek Walcott

Born on January 23, 1930, in Castries, Saint Lucia, Derek Walcott and his twin brother Roderick grew up fatherless after their father, a watercolorist and aspiring poet, died at thirty-one when the boys were barely a year old. Their mother ran the town's Methodist school and recited Shakespeare to her children. Walcott published his first poem at fourteen and self-published a collection, 25 Poems (1948), at eighteen, selling copies on street corners. He studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, then moved to Trinidad, where he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and ran it for nearly two decades. His poetry wrestled with the central dilemma of Caribbean identity: how to inherit the English language without inheriting the empire that imposed it. In a Green Night (1962) announced his lyric gift to the wider world. The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979) and Midsummer (1984) deepened his engagement with history, landscape, and the visual arts. Omeros (1990), a book-length poem that reimagined Homer's epics among the fishermen of Saint Lucia, secured his reputation, and the Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 1992. He also wrote over thirty plays and was a serious painter throughout his life, exhibiting watercolors of Caribbean light. He divided his later years between Saint Lucia, Trinidad, and Boston, where he taught at Boston University. He died on March 17, 2017, in Castries, the town where he was born.

At eighteen he asked his mother, a seamstress and schoolteacher raising three children alone, for two hundred dollars to print a book of poems. It was a fortune on her salary, but she found it. He mailed the manuscript to Trinidad, then sold 25 Poems on the street corners of Castries until he had earned back every cent.