Sir Derek Alton Walcott (1930–2017), poet, playwright, essayist, and painter, was born in Castries, Saint Lucia. His first published poem appeared in The Voice of Saint Lucia when he was fourteen years old; by the age of nineteen, he had self-published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). Those were followed by, among others: In A Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962); Omeros (1990); Tiepolo’s Hound (2000); The Prodigal: A Poem (2004); Selected Poems (2007); White Egrets (2010); and The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (2014). With his twin brother, Roderick, he co-founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop in 1950 and in 1957 was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study American Theatre. In 1981, while teaching at Boston University, he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. He is the author of several plays, among them: Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Isle Is Full of Noises (1982); The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992). Walcott’s first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says, was published in 1998. Among his many honours and awards are an Obie Award for distinguished foreign play (Dream on Monkey Mountain), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Montale Prize, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. In 1992, Walcott became the first Caribbean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2015 he received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Achievement Award.