18. March 2017

Saint Lucian poet and playwright Sir Derek Alton Walcott, dead at 87.

Derek Walcott died early Friday morning March 17 2017, at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia.


Picture of Derek Walcott
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Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017)

Though no cause was given for his death, he had been in poor health for some time now said his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

His works include the Omeros (1990), which many critics view as his major achievement. In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,[3] the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets[4] and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

 

With his passing, West Indian culture has lost its great poet.

 

 He majored in French, Latin and Spanish at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where he began writing plays and entering into a lifelong but rocky love affair with the theater. His first play, about the revolutionary Haitian leader Henri Christophe, was produced in St. Lucia in 1950.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1953, Mr. Walcott taught school in St. Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica while continuing to write and stage plays. His verse dramas “Ione” and “Sea at Dauphin” were produced in Trinidad in 1954. “Ti-Jean and His Brothers,” a retelling of a Trinidadian folk tale in which Lucifer tries to steal the souls of three brothers, was produced in Trinidad in 1958.

 

 

No stranger to the world

 

He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. Mr. Walcott studied directing with José Quintero in New York for a year and, on returning to the West Indies, founded a repertory company, the Little Carib Theater Workshop, which in the late 1960s became the Trinidad Theater Workshop.

Note; Some source materials for this story were found in: The New York Times and Wikipedia.

 

Read more about the man and his work



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