Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930.He is a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Walcott was educated at St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He began writing poetry at an early age, taught at schools in Saint Lucia and Grenada, and contributed articles and reviews to periodicals in Trinidad and Jamaica.

His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young. He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems. His first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says, was published in 1998. Walcott’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and  in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.