Walcott wins top priority prize

  

http://www.bbc.co.uk

Published on January 25th 2011 by News Staff

CASTRIES, St. Lucia -- St Lucian Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott has won one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in the world.

He scooped the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry on Monday 24 January for his 2010 collection "White Egrets".

Mr Walcott was chosen from a shortlist of ten authors.

The judges said they felt that his White Egrets was a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet.

The collection covers difficult subjects such as the complex colonial legacy of the Caribbean but also the wonders of modern St Lucia - where Walcott was born eighty years ago and now lives.

It also includes two poems written to United States president, Barack Obama.

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.