Earlier this year, St Lucian poet Derek Walcott confirmed his place as one of the greatest living poets writing in the English language when he picked up the T.S. Eliot Prize for his new collection of poetry, White Egrets.
At 81, the Nobel Laureate has given up his apartment in New York and has settled back on the island of his birth - the island that inspired so much of his work and is the setting for his epic poem Omeros, in which he recasts the central characters of Homer's Odyssey as St Lucian fishermen.
'I don't know how people manage with multiple houses,' says Walcott's partner, Sigrid Nama. 'It is much simpler to be in one place.' The place they have chosen is a small stretch of coast just outside the town Gros Islet in the north of St Lucia. 'We have always lived here because it is close to town - to Castries - because that is where Derek is from,' explains Nama. Three small buildings huddle around a swimming pool with views out over the Caribbean Sea to Pigeon Island promontory, an outcrop that was once a fortress and is now a national park.
'We lived in the white cottage for three years while the rest was being built,' she says, gesturing at a small whitewashed house. 'We fashioned it after the Royal by Rex Hotel down on Rodney Bay - one of our favourite hotels on the island. The next thing to be built was Derek's studio.'
Walcott paints daily, and his studio is cluttered with brushes and canvases that testify to this: paintings that are more colourful than life, portraits that seem to capture the rhythm of a character and scenes that seem to sing. It was painting that brought the couple together. 'We met in the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I knew of him as a painter because I ran an art gallery, but I was terrified of talking to him because I knew nothing of poetry,' she confides. 'That was 25 years ago.'
German-born Nama loves living in St Lucia. 'You never have to wear a jumper here,' she says. 'Only maybe a shawl if you go into a room that is air-conditioned. It's 27 degrees Celsius all year round.'