Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet, and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book that celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place. His later collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org