Omeros
by Derek Walcott
Homer's Odyssey, reborn in the Caribbean.
you want to understand the Caribbean as a civilization that created its own mythology from the wreckage of others
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Walcott takes the Odyssey and retells it through Caribbean fishermen in Saint Lucia — Achille, Hector, Helen — giving the island's ordinary people the full weight of epic tradition. He also appears in the poem himself, traveling through history and across the Atlantic. The Nobel committee described this as proof that the Caribbean had produced one of the great literary voices of the 20th century. A dispatch about what it means to build a culture from fragments of African, European, and Indigenous civilization — and what extraordinary beauty can emerge from that impossible synthesis.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Saint Lucia • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Saint Lucian author
- Themes
- After Empire
