CASTRIES – The St Lucia-born Nobel Laureate, Sir Derek Walcott, died Friday after a prolonged illness. He was 87.
Relatives, who were by his bedside, said Sir Derek, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, died at his home at 7:45 a.m.
No details of his illness have yet been disclosed.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. He was the second St Lucian to have won the Nobel Prize, following Sir Arthur Lewis who won the award for economics in 1979.
His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view “as Walcott’s major achievement.”
In addition to the Nobel prize, Sir Derek won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature as well as the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry, White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Sir Derek Walcott is survived by three children Peter, Elizabeth, and Anna. (CMC)
