Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer, visual artist and receipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

His works include the Homeric epic poem, Omeros (1990).Robert Graves wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries”.

In 2011, Walcott received the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry, White Egrets.

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies with a twin brother, the future playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister. His family was of mixed race and ethnicity; he had two white grandfathers and two black grandmothers. His family is of African and European descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island which he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at age 31 from mastoiditis while his wife was pregnant with the twins Derek and Roderick, who were born after his death. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.

MH17 victim families sue Putin, Russia in European rights court

Edit Dawn 21 May 2016

SYDNEY. Families of victims of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, are suing President Vladimir Putin and Russia for Aus$10 million each in the European Court of Human Rights, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday ... DAWN_VIDEO - /1029551/DAWN-RM-1x1 ... ....

photo: Creative Commons / Bulent KAVAKKORU

EgyptAir Flight 181 (aircraft pictured) is hijacked shortly after takeoff and forced to land at Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus.

EgyptAir flight: 'Smoke detected' inside cabin before crash

Edit The Times of India 21 May 2016

PARIS. France's aviation safety agency said Saturday that the EgyptAir A320 that crashed into the eastern Mediterranean with 66 people on board had transmitted automatic messages indicating smoke in the cabin. "There were ACARS messages emitted by the plane indicating that there was smoke in the cabin shortly before data transmission broke off," a spokesman of France's Bureau of Investigations and Analysis told AFP ... ....

photo: AP / A.M. Ahad

Bangladeshi people walk through a waterlogged street after heavy rainfall in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Cyclone Roanu kills 23 in Bangladesh

Edit The National 21 May 2016

Chittagong // Cyclone Roanu killed 23 people in Bangladesh on Saturday and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes amid strong winds and heavy downpours. Authorities took more than 500,000 people into shelters as the cyclone made landfall just after noon, packing winds of up to 88 kilometres per hour ... "Thousands of villagers were forced to flee their homes after the storm surge flooded their villages," he said....

photo: AP / Jens Meyer

Migrating cranes fly in front of the sun during sunset near Straussfurt, central Germany, Saturday, Nov. 1, 2014.

The World's Largest Solar Plant Just Torched Itself

Edit Gizmodo 20 May 2016

Putting 347,000 mirrors in the desert faced towards the sun clearly has its disadvantages ... ....

photo: AP / Susan Walsh

President Barack Obama heads to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Saturday, May 21, 2016. Obama is leaving on a weeklong, 16,000-mile trip to Asia as part of his effort to pay more attention to the region and boost economic and security cooperation.(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Obama Leaves For Asia To Boost Trade, Cooperation

Edit TPM 21 May 2016

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama departed Saturday on a weeklong, 16,000-mile trip to Asia, part of his effort to pay more attention to the region and boost economic and security cooperation. He'll spend three days in Vietnam, with stops in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, for meetings with leaders, a speech on U.S.-Vietnam relations, visits to cultural treasures and sessions with civic leaders and entrepreneurs ... ....

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How to turn down a prestigious literary prize – a winner’s guide to etiquette

Edit The Guardian 21 May 2016

Refusing competition ... A variant is exiting a specific competition made messy by mud-slinging, as with Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the 2009 Oxford poetry professorship race after personal smears, Vintil Horia’s refusal of the 1960 main Goncourt prize (he had been accused of past membership of Romania’s far-right Iron Guard), and last year’s hoo-ha at the Hugo awards for SF and fantasy, when two novel prize nominees pulled out. Pro ... ....

The creator of ‘Mad Men’ started out as a poet

Edit New York Post 26 Apr 2016

Before he wrote for “The Sopranos” and created “Mad Men,” Matthew Weiner wrote poetry. “Writers were revered in my house and poets were at the top,” says Weiner, the son of a doctor and a lawyer. His all-boys high school introduced him to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a work he visits over and over again ... Geography III ... by Derek Walcott. Derek Walcott’s from the islands, and what he writes is part Elizabethan English, part Creole patois ... ....

Award-winning composer Dr Shirley J Thompson receives Luminary Award (University of Westminster)

Edit Public Technologies 12 Apr 2016

(Source. University of Westminster) ... Dr Thompson became the first woman in Europe in 40 years to compose and conduct a symphony. She is also the first woman to conduct and compose music for a major BBC drama series. Commenting on receiving the prestigious award, Dr Thompson said ... Previous recipients have included maestros Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Harry Belafonte, Louise Bennett and Derek Walcott - persons who I greatly admire ... (noodl....

a fitting end to a life’s work

Edit New Statesman 06 Apr 2016

Heaney’s account of Aeneas’s encounters with the dead across death’s river is even more powerful for its restraint. " data-adaptive-image-768-img="" data-adaptive-image-1024-img="" data-adaptive-image-max-img="">. Anglophone poetry has long been transfixed by the ancient epic. Christopher Logue, Derek Walcott, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald have all produced creative reimaginings of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey ... “Ask me to translate . ... . ... ....

The #derangedpoetess

Edit The Hindu 25 Mar 2016

On the question of hybridity, I was recently reminded of these lines by Derek Walcott, which I hadn’t thought about for a long time. “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” Walcott’s point here, as the descendant of two white and two black grandparents, is that these sorts of ......

New voices rattle Rhodes

Edit Mail Guardian South Africa 24 Mar 2016

It’s Sunday night in Grahamstown. After an extraordinary week of struggle, here and across the country, students are gathered for a vigil. This is a town born in the blood and terror of a colonial crime. That crime structures the present. There are perpetually emerald fields on one side of town and shacks on the other ... It festers in the present ... It rots in the sun and blows in the wind ... He has chosen Derek Walcott’s The Light of the World ... ....

Media Release: NGC Bocas Lit Fest (NGC - National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited)

Edit Public Technologies 21 Mar 2016

(Source. NGC - National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited). 'NGC is thrilled to play an important role in an event that excites and inspires thousands of readers and writers alike ... World-renowned writers such as Earl Lovelace, Derek Walcott, Monique Roffey, Olive Senior and Irvine Welsh have all attended and participated in previous Bocas Lit Fests ... For further information please contact. ... Email ... Original Document ... (noodl....

A Talk with Poet Elizabeth Alexander

Edit Huffington Post 17 Mar 2016

Elizabeth Alexander (Credit. Alpha Smoot). Poet, essayist, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander was in Tokyo recently to kick off the Tokyo International Literary Festival, her first appearance in Japan ... In 2009, she composed and read a poem, "Praise Song for the Day," for President Barack Obama's inauguration ... What's your impression of Japan? ... I was admitted to study fiction, but I went because Derek Walcott, whose work I loved, was there ... ....

Artist Ross Wilson hopes St Patrick's mural will help overturn myths about Ireland's patron saint and his famous royal friendship

Edit Belfast Telegraph 12 Mar 2016

But it was Ross who found himself travelling after the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned him to paint the acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott in St Lucia ... The director of the gallery said it was Derek Walcott who asked for me to paint his portrait." ... "Derek Walcott sat for me in St Lucia and I came home to finish the piece in a renovated cottage, which used to house pigs," says Ross....

Finding the centre in 197 books

Edit The Hindu 12 Mar 2016

recognised, she was told that the list could not be shared as it was a “very political” subject ... Derek Walcott self-published long before his Nobel — and at the other end of the literary spectrum, Samoan Lani Wendt Young has achieved commercial success with the self-published Telesa series about an 18-year-old American Samoan’s adjustment in her mother’s homeland.Remaking identities ... Keywords....

Dún Laoghaire’s Mountains to Sea literary festival has a tough act to follow

Edit The Irish Times 05 Mar 2016

For instance, in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, once home to greats such as Joyce, Synge and Beckett, we take pride in the long list of distinguished literary names we’ve brought to the county through Poetry Now, Mountains to Sea and the DLR Voices Series ... Despite these disappointments, the line-up included three future Nobel laureates, in Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, plus Chinua Achebe, Les Murray and Susan Sontag ... ....

Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol honours Ned Thomas (Aberystwyth University)

Edit Public Technologies 02 Mar 2016

(Source. Aberystwyth University). 02 March 2016. Ned Thomas ... Also honoured will be Geraint Talfan Davies and Rhian Huws Williams ... Ned Thomas is a prominent figure in the intellectual life of contemporary Wales ... During his time at Aberystwyth University's Department of English, he lectured through the medium of Welsh on post-colonial literature and published studies on the work of Derek Walcott, George Orwell and Waldo Williams ... AU7416....

The sequel to Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: women, look upon these works and weep…

Edit The Guardian 23 Feb 2016

Anyone, that is, who is interested in the human condition as uniquely observed and distilled by poetry ... Twitter ... Twitter ... Ezra Pound is the choice of Mary Beard, as he was of Craig Raine; John Updike of Tina Brown as of Joseph O’Neill; Harold Pinter of his widow, Antonia Fraser, as he was of Neil LaBute; Adrienne Rich of Kate Mosse and Anish Kapoor; Derek Walcott of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as well as Mark Haddon and Tom Hiddleston ... ....

Walcott, Derek Filmography