Derek Walcott: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Derek Alton Walcott

(born Jan. 23, 1930, Castries, Saint Lucia) West Indian poet and playwright. Walcott was educated in Saint Lucia and Jamaica, and after 1958 he lived in Trinidad and the U.S. Many of his works explore the Caribbean cultural experience. He is best known for his poetry; in volumes such as In a Green Night (1962), The Gulf (1969), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), The Bounty (1997), and White Egrets (2010), Walcott's erudition is submerged in sweeping rhythmic and sensuous sonorities. His book-length poems include Omeros (1990), a retelling of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a 20th-century Caribbean setting, and The Prodigal (2004). Tiepolo's Hound (2000) is a poetic biography of West Indian-born French painter Camille Pissarro. Of Walcott's approximately 30 plays, the best-known are Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced 1967), and Pantomime (1978). In 1992 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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