From the memoir: A journalist recalls meeting writer Derek Walcott after he won the Nobel Prize

In the air, through thick clouds on the rocking plane to St Lucia, I feel like a late guest at a party. The Nobel Laureate had invited me to see him for the weekend about my writing. I wonder whether he was just in need of an acolyte to buoy him up. Perhaps I’m good at the trope: woman, a worshipper of language, sensitive to rejection.

The invitation followed an interview I did with him when the university at St Augustine honoured him. I was in the audience, craning my neck to see him, eager to hear him read from his latest work, as if he had answers to all things.

Walcott didn’t fuck up the audience or professors as VS Naipaul had done, in this same hall, with his supercilious, truncated, pained answers. He hadn’t, like Naipaul, sneered at questions from students. “I don’t understand”, or said, “Schoolchildren shouldn’t study Literature.” No, he was all theatre, with his solid build, the leathery, slashed skin of a seafarer, the darting green eyes of a sunning iguana. He held back from being intimidating by being alert, alternately jokey and silent.

Amidst knowing literary laughter (and the academics collectively holding their breath when a student...

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