Born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930, Derek Walcott studied at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. His collection of poems In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (Jonathan Cape, 1962), celebrating the Caribbean, brought him to public attention. Subsequent works include Omeros (Faber & Faber, 1990), an epic poem in which he invokes the lives and voices of the people of the Caribbean through Greek myth and epic, which the WH Smith Literary Award; and White Egrets (Faber & Faber, 2010), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2010. He was also shortlisted for Eliot Prize for The Bounty in 1997 and Tiepolo’s Hound in 2000. His Collected Poems 1948-1984 were published in 1986. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1988, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He died in 2017. Author photo © Nigel Parry
Shortlisted Works
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This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2011. The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce that Derek Walcott has won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2010 with White Egrets, published by Faber & Faber. The...
This article on the T. S. Eliot Prize was first published on the Poetry Book Society website in 2010. The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce the shortlist for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2010. Judges Anne Stevenson (Chair), Bernardine Evaristo and Michael Symmons Roberts have chosen...
