Derek Walcott biography

Profile

Derek Walcott is best known for his poetry, beginning with In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962), a book typical of his early poetry in its celebration of the Caribbean landscape's natural beauty. In his poem Omeros, he retells the dramas of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a 20th-century Caribbean setting. He has written more than 30 plays and in 1992 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.