37 Facts About Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright.

Derek Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, the son of Alix and Warwick Derek Walcott.

Derek Walcott had a twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott.

Derek Walcott's family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry.

Derek Walcott's father was a civil servant and a talented painter.

Derek Walcott died when Walcott and his brother were one year old, and were left to be raised by their mother.

Derek Walcott's mother, who was a teacher at a Methodist elementary school, provided her children with an environment where their talents could be nurtured.

Derek Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.

Derek Walcott greatly admired Cezanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them.

Derek Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers.

Derek Walcott studied as a writer, becoming "an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English" and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T S Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Derek Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer.

At 14, Derek Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem, in the newspaper The Voice of St Lucia.

Derek Walcott sold copies to his friends and covered the costs.

Derek Walcott gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed.

Derek Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its board of directors.

Derek Walcott was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981.

Derek Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis.

Derek Walcott retired from his position at Boston University in 2007.

Derek Walcott became friends with other poets, including the Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the US after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who taught in Boston.

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960.

Derek Walcott won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair in Creative Writimy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007.

In 2008, Derek Walcott gave the first Cola Debrot Lectures In 2009, Derek Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta.

Derek Walcott said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were friends.

Derek Walcott published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have been widely staged elsewhere.

Derek Walcott discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly Indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity.

Derek Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.

Derek Walcott gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.

People perceive the world on dual channels, Derek Walcott's verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, and each is constantly seeping into the other.

Kirsch explores the post-colonial politics in Derek Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence".

In 1954 Derek Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, and they had a son, the St Lucian painter Peter Derek Walcott.

Derek Walcott married a second time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked as an almoner in a hospital.

In 1976, Derek Walcott married for a third time, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993.

Derek Walcott was known for his passion for traveling to countries around the world.

In 2009, Derek Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Derek Walcott died at his home in Cap Estate, St Lucia, on 17 March 2017.