Derek Walcott

Nobel Prize-Winning Poet and Playwright

Derek Walcott , keynote speaker
Derek Walcott , keynote speaker Derek Walcott , keynote speaker
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott is a giant of modern poetry. Joseph Brodsky writes of Walcott: "He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in language." 
Highlights "For almost forty years his throbbing relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the modern map of poetry would effectively match wallpaper." - Joseph Brodsky
Book Speaker

Derek Walcott has published ten revered books of poetry, including The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, his Nobel lecture, which was published in 1992. Walcott has been honored with a plethora of international prizes, including the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He was a recipient of a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation and is an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Walcott is based out of New York City and Castries, St. Lucia. He poetry books include Another Life, The Star Apple Kingdom, The Fortunate Traveller, The Bounty and Collected Poems 1948-1984, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.

In addition to his poetry, he is the founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop. His plays—which include Dream on Monkey Mountain, Remembrance and Pantomime and The Odyssey—have been produced internationally, including the New York Shakespeare Festival.
  • Moon-Child: A Play Moon-Child: A Play

    In Moon-Child, the poet and playwright Derek Walcott returns to the island of St. Lucia for a lush and vivid tale of spirituality and the supernatural. In this lyrical new work, the crafty Planter (who may or may not be the Devil in disguise) schemes to take over the island for development. Between him and his goal lies the Bouton family, whose ailing matriarch strikes a bargain: if any of her three sons can get the Devil to feel anger and human weakness, the islanders will win the right to spend the rest of their days in wealth and peace.

    In a fable that reaches from St. Lucia's verdant forests to an explosive ending amid its plantation homes, Walcott has crafted a masterwork rich in flowing language and colorful Creole patois. With roots in Caribbean folklore and an eye toward the island's postcolonial legacy and complex racial identities, Moon-Child marks a remarkable new addition to the canon of one of the world's most prolific Caribbean playwrights.

  • White Egrets White Egrets

    In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time's cunning passages, the poet's place in all of this - with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.

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