Derek Walcott was a West Indian poet and playwright, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature for his depiction of Caribbean life and culture in the post-colonial era. Born into a family of English, Dutch, and African descent and fed from childhood with English classics, he inherited the richness of mixed cultures and this he has depicted in his vast oeuvre of plays and poems. Initially trained as a painter, he self-published his first book of poems at the age of eighteen and gained international acclaim as a poet by the age of thirty-two. Although he mostly wrote on the vivid landscape and culture of his homeland, many of his works also expressed his isolation, resulting from a conflict between his Western education and the black folk traditions in which he had been nurtured from childhood. He was equally active as a playwright, producing around thirty plays. He was also a successful academician, teaching at various American universities. In spite of his success, both his professional and domestic lives were quite stormy and he was short of money till he received the Nobel Prize.