Derek walcott brief biography of martin

Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of forty-four lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self-published two volumes, Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (Barbados Advocate, 1949) and 25 Poems (1948), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951, he published the volume Poems.

In 1957, Walcott was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. He published numerous collections of poetry in his lifetime, most recently The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); White Egrets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); The Prodigal: A Poem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); and Tiepolo’s Hound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott also wrote several plays produced throughout the United States: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University in 1981.

Walcott’s first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1998.

About Walcott’s work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said,

For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept a

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Derek Walcott, a famous Saint Lucian poet and playwright was born in 1930 near the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, near the town of Castries. Raising on the remote volcanic island-once home to a British colony-had a profound impact on Walcott's life and creative output. It was rumored that his two grandparents were descended from slaves.

Derek and his twin brother Roderick were just a few years old when their father, a bohemian watercolorist, passed away. His mother ran the Methodist school in town. Following his education at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and St. Mary's College on his home island, Walcott relocated to Trinidad in 1953 and has since worked as a theatrical and art critic. He debuted at the age of eighteen with a book of twenty-five poems, but it was the 1962 collection In a Green Night that gave him his big break. Many of his early pieces were staged by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he created in 1959.

Despite his frequent travels, Walcott has always felt firmly anchored in Caribbean civilization, which is a fusion of African, Asian, and European cultures. This is evident in his efforts to build an indigenous play. He has spent many years splitting his time between Boston University, where he teaches creative writing and literature, and Trinidad, where he makes a living as a writer.

Derek Walcott: Childhood and Education

On January 23, 1930, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia. An island in the West Indies is called Saint Lucia. Around the house, Walcott's mother, a creative educator, would often recite poems. When Derek Walcott, along with his twin brother Roderick Walcott, were just one year old, their painter and civil servant father passed away. Along with his brother and sister, Derek Walcott was reared by his mother. The family's African, Dutch, and English ancestry represents the Caribbean islands' colonial past.

Career

Derek's intricately metaphorical

Saint Lucian poet and playwright (1930–2017)

Sir Derek Alton WalcottKCSLOBEOMOCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright.

He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homericepic poemOmeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's 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, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Early life and childhood

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, the son of Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott. He had a twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His fath