Derek Walcott was born in 1930 on the island of Saint Lucia. He published his first poem, a 44-line poem in blank verse, in the local newspaper at the age of fourteen. At nineteen he self-published two books, borrowing $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners. Walcott’s poetry often addresses his English and West Indian ancestry, and resounds with Island images while remaining under the influence of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Through a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, Derek Walcott attended the University of the West Indies. After college, he received a fellowship to study theatre in the United States.

Since then he has taught at Boston University, where he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. Walcott has also had a successful career as a playwright; his play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, won an Obie award. In 1990 Walcott published Omeros, a book-length epic poem that re-imagines the Trojan War as a conflict among Caribbean fishermen. Among his many honors, Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992; he has also been the recipient of a MacArthur award.