The poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who moulded the language and forms of the western canon to his own purposes for more than half a century, has died aged 87. The former poet laureate Andrew Motion paid tribute to “a wise and generous and brilliant man”. “Walcott always insisted that he was a Caribbean writer,” Miller said, “and that this wasn’t a limit, that it didn’t make his work parochial. One case was settled out of court, but this was said to have counted against him when he was passed over for the post of poet laureate in 1999. I’m a Caribbean writer.”

Source: The Guardian March 17, 2017 14:14 UTC