Poet and playwright Derek Walcott was born on January 23, 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia in the West Indies. His father, a water color painter, died when Walcott was young. They were raised by their mother, who ran Castries’ Methodist school. He had one brother, a twin named Roderick.

After studying at St. Mary’s college on Saint Lucia Walcott moved on to the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica. From there he moved to Trinidad in 1953, working as an art and theater critic. By then he had made his debut in the poetry world with his first work, 25 Poems. Walcott would not make a true breakthrough into the literary world, however, until he published In a Green Night, a similar collection of poems, in 1962.

Walcott made his initial professional foray into the dramatic world in 1949 when he wrote his first play, Henry Christophe. It proved a success, and Walcott was awarded by the Rockafeller Foundation with a scholarship to study drama in the United States. Not long after Walcott began teaching in St Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica. But he wanted to do more than just teach: he wanted to create.

So Walcott founded his own company, the Trinidad Theater Workshop (though it was initially known as the Little Carib Theater Workshop). He used this company to put on the first few of his plays, and it still survives to this day in a much expanded and lucrative format.

Walcott has continued to wrote and produce plays and poetry ever since, creating 21 books of poetry to date (though two of those are collected editions of earlier poems) and 21 plays (though, again, three of these plays are combined versions of earlier works). He seems to have stopped doing plays – his last was The Capeman, in 1997 – though his poetry continues, with his latest in 2004 (The Prodigal) and a collection of his work in 2007.

In particular Walcott is known for his 1990 epic poem Omeros, which takes Homeric story and tradition and transplants them into the framework of the Caribbean. The first of the poem’s three subjects is the most Homeric in tone, as it features two men – Achille and Hector – fighting over the love of a woman, Helen. It also focuses a great deal of time on an injured fisherman called Philoctete. The second section deals with a pair of Europeans living on St. Lucia who find themselves having to cope with the island’s history of colonization. And, finally, the third section is that dominated by the poet himself, who spends a great deal of time wandering the Atlantic and ponders the action of the poem as it goes on.

Walcott was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in 1992. At current he spends most of his time teaching creative writing at Boston University, and can occasionally be found giving lectures elsewhere in the world.