Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a poet and a playwright. He was born on the island of St. Lucia into a world divided

between native Caribbean patwa and the well-honed vowels of British colonialism.

He started writing poetry at the age of eight. Today, age 61, he's just been given the

W.H. Smith Award for his ambitious narrative poem, Omeros, which transposes the

characters of Homer's famous epic to a fishing community in the West Indies.

His admirers say he's one of the greatest exponents of the English language alive today and

a future Nobel Prize winner. Now professor of poetry at Boston University,

he still returns frequently to the island of St Lucia,

where in a house near the beach he writes and paints.

He is Derek Walcott. you wrote your first poem at the age of eight do you remember

what it was well I don't remember in the actual first poem I remember writing from

as far back as I can remember and you know you feel a triumph at that age that you can get a

rhyme together or rhymes together and the shape. And who did you show them

to? My mother who was a school teacher,

and did a lot of recitation around the house of very good poetry,

of Shakespeare, another tennis and, you know,

my father, who died when I was one also wrote verse and evidently you know

ran amateur theatricals in Castries and in solution so that she would remind us very

repeatedly how we should play Porscheia in, you know, the Merchant of Venice, not the whole play, but scenes from Portia's speech.

And I remember she also knew Cardinal Woolsey's Farewell address, you know, so I heard that kind of sound at home

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