Between Fury and Peace: The Many Arts of Derek Walcott

Here you will find a very special edition of Arrowsmith Journal on Derek Walcott — friends, students, colleagues, and scholars have come together to produce a full book of essays about his life and work. Click the button below to read the PDF of this book, which will be available for purchase in the fall of 2022. Featuring Essays by: Peter Balakian, Robert Bensen, Sven Birkerts, Peter Campion, Rachel DeWoskin, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Martin Edmunds, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Carolyn Forché, Jonathan Galassi, Dan Hunter, Kirun Kapur, Karl Kirchwey, Adam Kirsch, John Robert Lee, Glyn Maxwell, Askold Melnyczuk, Caryl Phillips, Steven Ratiner, Eva Salzman, Bob Scanlan, Tom Sleigh, Kate Snodgrass, Jacob Strautmann, and Rosanna Warren.

Below is a short biography of Derek Walcott, and the table of contents of this volume.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January, 1930 – 17 March, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught graduate and undergraduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.