This is a late collection of essays by the Nobel Prize winning novelist VS Naipaul, who was of Indian descent, from Trinidad, and who wrote in English. The poet in the title of the essay (as Naipaul tells us “the reader may have guessed”) is Derek Walcott, who forms a kind of rival and mentor figure for the young Naipaul as a fledgling writer and thinker. Naipaul was not a poet and tells us he didn’t really like poetry that much either. So having his […]
Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet in one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvelous first book of poems.
A Writer's Journey by VS Naipaul