The Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott has died, aged 87. Walcott was born in Saint Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930, to a painter father (who died when Derek was one) and a headmistress mother. As a young man he pursued both painting and writing, and published his first poetry collection in 1948, while still in his teens.
He studied English literature, French and Latin at University College of the West Indies in Jamaica and in 1953 moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a theatre and art critic. Having already written several plays, in 1959 he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Walcott’s breakthrough as a poet came with his 1962 collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960.
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