Conversations with Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott was born in Castries, St. Lucia on January 23, 1930. He received a bachelor's degree in French, Latin, and Spanish at the University of the West Indies in 1953. He also began writing plays. His first play, about the revolutionary Haitian leader Henri Christophe, was produced in St. Lucia in 1950.

He taught at schools in St. Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica while continuing to write and stage plays. His plays included Lone, Sea at Dauphin, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Malcochon, and Dream on Monkey Mountain. He later wrote the book and collaborated with the singer and songwriter Paul Simon on the lyrics for The Capeman, a musical about a Puerto Rican gang member who murdered three people in Manhattan in 1959. He was a professor at Boston University from 1981 until retiring in 2007.

His metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism, and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds His collections of poetry included In a Green Night, Selected Poems, The Castaway, The Gulf, Sea Grapes, Another Life, Omeros, Tiepolo's Hound, and The Prodigal. He received the Queens Medal for Poetry, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection, White Egrets, in 2011. He died on March 17, 2017 at the age of 87.

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