Arrowsmith Press, in cooperation with the Derek Walcott Festival /Derek Walcott Estate, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Honoring the work of St. Lucian Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott, the prize is offered annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen published anywhere in the world. It includes a $2000 USD honorarium.
WALCOTT 2025 WINNERS:
This 2025 Walcott Prize judge was Ishion Hutchinson. He is the author of three poetry collections, School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons, and Far District and the book of essays, Fugitive Tilts. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta’s first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view “as Walcott’s major achievement.”In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation”genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
