Category=DNB
Category=DSBH
Category=DSC
Category=DSG
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780198711315
- Weight: 1325g
- Dimensions: 165 x 242mm
- Publication Date: 26 Oct 2000
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This is the first literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate of England. The author has had access to letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Walcott is seen as someone driven by the need to justify his life and fulfil his talents before an unknowable God, but who, in mastering the ways of the world often regards himself as an example of fallen humanity. Besides offering an approach to Walcott as a poet, dramatist, theatre director, arts critic, and teacher, the book shows how his desire to be a painter influenced his vision and the way he works.
Bruce King is a freelance editor and writer. He has held professorships or distinguished visiting professorships at Ahmadu Bello (Nigeria), Lagos, Stirling, Windsor (Canada), Canterbury (NZ), Ben Gurion (Israel), Angers (France) Paris III, Paris VII, and North Alabama.
