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This succinct account the life of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott focuses on his development as poet, playwright and man of the theatre: director, producer, teacher. Friends and colleagues who figured in his career are recalled. The importance of his native St Lucia and family influences in the shaping of his creativity and his view of the world are highlighted, as these evolved in synergy with his receptivity to the poetry and theatre of the wider world. In this evolution, the tensions and complex nuances of the concept home are seen as an informing factor. The story points to Walcotts seminal contribution to the emergence of Caribbean literature, with his response to the regions colonial history as a central factor.

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Miss Lou had the instinctive wisdom to relate language to identity. As a people who have long since lost our identity, we continue to search for it.

There is an interrelationship between language  the words we use  and our identity. In that regard, Miss Lou helped us to remember who we are. However, mental slavery is still with us. While we continue to deny our own language, our way of expressing ourselves, there is no escaping the fact that our language is part of our identity as Jamaicans.

Although a lot of our unique cultural DNA disappeared during the Middle Passage, Miss Lou had the wisdom and the courage to grasp what remained of that DNA and give voice to the voiceless. She did it with such decisiveness that I have lived to see the day when Patwa, or Jamaican Language as it is properly called, has taken its rightful place as an important part of our identity.

That is Miss Lous legacy. - Beverly Manley-Duncan

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Earl Lovelace is a major Caribbean writer, one of the few of his generation to have lived in and written almost exclusively from the region. With sharp observation and even sharper wit, his writing pulses with the rhythm, flow and vibrancy of the lives of ordinary people, whose culture and language he champions.

Lovelace explores the intricacies of his multicultural society as it grapples with a legacy of slavery, indentureship and colonialism and faces the challenges of independence and new nationhood, and he does so with compassion and true understanding.

In this brief but rich biography, Funso Aiyejina explores the writer and his work with the intimacy of a friend and the perceptiveness of a scholar. Lovelace himself is as storied as one of his characters, and the man and his life shine through. This biography is essential reading for any student of Caribbean literature, and will be equally compelling for a general reader.