Nobel Laureate Poet, Playwright. He was a noted West Indian poet and playwright who was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was educated at St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He began writing poetry at an early age, taught at schools in Saint Lucia and Grenada, and contributed articles and reviews to periodicals in Trinidad and Jamaica. He also started writing plays and their production began in Saint Lucia in 1950 and from 1958 to 1959 he studied theater in New York City. He lived thereafter in Trinidad and the United States, teaching for part of the year at Boston University. He was best known for his poetry which began with his book "In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960" in 1962. This book was typical of his early poetry which celebrated the Caribbean landscape's natural beauty. His later work included "The Castaway" (1965), "The Gulf" (1969), "Another Life" (1973), "Sea Grapes" (1976), "The Star-Apple Kingdom" (1979), "Midsummer" (1984), "Omeros" (1990), and "The Prodigal" (2004). His poems painted powerful images of his Caribbean home and evoked the sound of its spoken languages. His poems were also often spiritual and dealt with the fraught project of building an identity in the post-colonial Caribbean. His epic poem, “Omeros", which loosely transplants "The Iliad" into 20th century St. Lucia, is often cited as his greatest work. Of the thirty plays he wrote during his career, the best known were "Dream on Monkey Mountain" (1967), "Ti-Jean and His Brothers" (1958), and "Pantomime" (1978). Many of his plays used themes from black folk culture in the Caribbean. He was later awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2011 for his career work. He also received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and an Obie Award. Queen Elizabeth II made him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972, and in 2016, a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia. He passed away after a long illness