After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.[13] He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its board of directors.[12][14]
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted international attention.[2] His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. Makak is the protagonist in this play; and "Makak"s condition represents the condition of the colonized natives under the oppressive forces of the powerful colonizers".[15] In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[16] The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.[17]
He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis. Walcott retired from his position at Boston University in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.[14]
Walcott's epic poem Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the Iliad, has been critically praised as his "major achievement."[2] The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose Omeros as one of its "Best Books of 1990".[18]
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment".[2] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[19] for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.
His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolours;[20] The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T. S. Eliot Prize[2][13] and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.[21]
Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007.[22] In 2008, Walcott gave the first Cola Debrot Lectures[23] In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.[24]
As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, he became one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia.[25]
