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DEREK WALCOTT (B. 1930) Perhaps the finest English-language poet alive today, Derek Walcott was born in the Caribbean island of St Lucia. A child prodigy in painting and poetry, in 1950 he enrolled at the Jamaican campus of the fledgling University of West Indies, where he studied English Literature, French and Latin. Influenced as much by the art of classical European antiquity as by the vernacular lives and languages of ordinary Caribbean peoples, Walcott’s poetry is often characterized by its compassionate response to the bloody past of Caribbean history, the eschewal of racial politics to solve the enduring inequalities of empire, and a pseudo-religious faith in the transformative and redemptive powers of art. These impulses can be detected through-out several collections of poetry, such as In a Green Night (1962), The Castaway and other poems (1965), Another Life (1973), Midsummer (1984), the epic Omeros (1990), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) and The Prodigal (2005). Walcott has also helped to nurture the development of drama in the Caribbean, and especially in Trinidad where he helped to found the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. His plays, such as The Sea at Dauphin (1954) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), have been vital in contributing to the creation of a home-grown Caribbean theatre. In 1992 Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He divides his time between St Lucia and the USA, where he teaches creative writing at Boston University.