Derek Walcott - Omeros

World Book Club

This month we mark the recent death of the St Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott with another chance to hear him talk-on-the-programme about his poetic masterpiece, the book-length Omeros.

Following the wanderings of an extraordinary cast of characters from the island of St Lucia, Omeros echoes Homer’s ancient-Greek epic of war and love and deadly rivalry, the Iliad, in order to dramatise the lives, sufferings, displacements and conflicts of the inhabitants of today’s Caribbean.

It also explores the islands’ violent history of colonial wars and slavery.

(Picture: Derek Walcott. Photo credit: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.)