The second Nobel winner on our list, Walcott's a poet who comes from a teeny-tiny island nation in the Caribbean called St. Lucia (it's really tiny). He's one of the most important writers to engage with the Caribbean's complicated racial, cultural and colonial history. Did we mention he's a poet? Just goes to show you that postcolonial lit can come in all kinds of forms.

Walcott uses his poetry to rewrite colonial history from the perspective of those who were the victims of colonialism in the Caribbean. From the indigenous Carib peoples who were violated by colonialism to the African slaves brought over to work on plantations, Walcott tells the kinds of stories that colonization tried to wipe out.

Omeros (1990)

This is Walcott's big poem. We mean, it's so big, it models itself on the mothers-of-all-epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. ("Omeros" is "Homer" in Greek.) Walcott is taking classic texts from the Western tradition—it doesn't get more classic than Homer, folks—and rewriting them from the perspective of the colonized. Here, Walcott writes from the perspective of St. Lucians.

Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970)

Walcott is so good, he not only writes poetry, he writes drama, too. Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play about—you guessed it—a man who has a dream. It's an allegory about Caribbean history, culture, and colonialism. This one is all about the connections between the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.