Derek Walcott (1930–2017)

Derek Walcott was born on the small Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, son of a civil servant father who died when Walcott was one year old, and a schoolteacher mother who read Shakespeare aloud to her class. He grew up speaking English in a French Creole world, inside a colonial culture that told him his island was provincial and its history did not matter.

He decided his island was the centre of the world and Homer was a local poet. Omeros — his most ambitious work — retells the Iliad and Odyssey with Saint Lucian fishermen as its heroes, the Caribbean Sea as its wine-dark water, the history of slavery as its wound that will not close. He did not borrow from Homer. He claimed him.

His Nobel Prize in 1992 was awarded for "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." He was the first writer born in the English-speaking Caribbean to win it.

His Nobel Lecture (1992), "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory", opens in a village in Trinidad called Felicity, where the descendants of Indian cane-cutters are staging the Ramayana in a field. Read it at NobelPrize.org.