Derek Walcott is born

On this day, poet and playwright Derek Walcott is born in St. Lucia, in the Carribbean. Walcott will win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Walcott's family descended from slaves in the West Indies, and the legacy of slavery is a common theme in his work. Deeply interested in theater as well as poetry, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1957, which allowed him to study with a prominent director in New York for two years. In New York, he founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop. He wrote more than 30 plays while continuing to publish poetry collections regularly. Walcott was the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize.