His writing reflected the richness of life in the Caribbean

Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning poet known for capturing the essence of his native Caribbean and who became the region’s most internationally famous writer, has died on the island of St. Lucia. He was 87.

Walcott died early on Friday at his home in the eastern Caribbean nation, according to his son, Peter.

The prolific and versatile poet received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1992 after being shortlisted for the honour for many years. In selecting Walcott, the academy cited the great luminosity” of his writings, including the 1990 Omeros, a 64-chapter Caribbean epic it praised as “majestic”.

A ‘religious vocation’

“In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet,” said the Swedish academy in awarding the $1.2 million prize to Walcott.

Walcott, who was of African, Dutch and English ancestry, said his writing reflected the “very rich and complicated experience” of life in the Caribbean. He compared his feeling for poetry to a religious vocation.

His dazzling, painterly work earned him a reputation as one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century.

With passions ranging from watercolour painting to teaching to theatre, Walcott’s work was widely praised for its depth and bold use of metaphor, and its mix of sensuousness and technical prowess.

Soviet exile poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1987, once complained that some critics relegated Walcott to regional status because of “an unwillingness ... to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man.”

Celebrating identity

Walcott himself proudly celebrated his role as a Caribbean writer. “I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer,” he once said during a 1985 interview published in The Paris Review.

“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination — it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.”

Walcott was born in St. Lucia’s capital of Castries on January 23, 1930, to a Methodist schoolteacher mother and a civil servant father, an aspiring artist who died when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were babies. His mother, Alix, instilled the love of language in them, often reciting Shakespeare and reading aloud other classics of English literature.