Naipaul on Walcott in The Guardian

V.S. Naipaul recalls reading Derek Walcott’s poems for the first time in The Guardian

But in the strangest way something like that had happened. The young poet became famous among us. He came from the island of St Lucia. If Trinidad was a dot on the map of the world, it could be said that St Lucia was a dot on that dot. And he had had his book published in Barbados. For island people the sea was a great divider: it led to different landscapes, different kinds of houses, people always slightly racially different, with strange accents. But the young poet and his book had overcome all of that: it was as though, as in a Victorian homily, virtue and dedication had made its way against the odds.

The poet was Derek Walcott. As a poet in the islands, for 15 or 16 or 20 years, until he made a reputation abroad, he had a hard row to hoe; for some time he even had to work for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian. Forty-three years after his first book of poems came out, self-published, he won the Nobel prize for literature.