Arena — Season 1, Episode 443: Derek Walcott
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
An interview with the poet who last December won the Nobel prize for literature, and whose current novel-length poem has caused him to be dubbed the "Homer of the Caribbean". He talks to Stuart Hall on the Caribbean island of St Lucia where he was born about how his family, the people of St Lucia and the physical beauty of the island have inspired a brilliant career as poet and playwright spanning more than 40 years. With Europe's current political and ethnic turmoil, the Caribbean mixture of cultures, religions and peoples are, for Walcott, a positive example. He reads from Omeros, which reflects the lives of the St Lucian fishermen today as well as the island's colonial history through the adventures of the mythical characters of classical Greece described in the Odyssey.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.