West Indian dramatist and poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, is expected to appear at a colloquium to be held in Tainan City tomorrow, the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature reported yesterday.
Walcott, who was born in Castries, St. Lucia in 1930 to a British father and a West Indian mother, will attend the colloquium titled: "Poetry, Language and Identity," to be sponsored by the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature with various local poets, academics and literati also taking part.
It is hoped that Walcott, who skillfully fuses folk island culture with the classical and avant-garde in his poems, will be inspirational to Taiwan's literary circles at a time when Taiwan is enthusiastically promoting maritime culture, a museum spokesman said.
Walcott also visited Taiwan in 2002, when he was the focus of a week of readings, discussions and lectures.
Walcott, who from the age of eight envisaged becoming a poet, published his first poem at 14 and had his first verse collection printed by the time he was 18.
Walcott, who divides his time between the US and Trinidad, exalts in the English language with his meticulously honed poems and evocative dramas, while also using a rich mix of Latin, French and Trinidadian patois.
In addition to poems and verse, Walcott also writes plays and epic poems. His 1990 epic poem Omeros, which echoes Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as it examines the Caribbean's colonial past and complex present, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.
Often focusing on West Indian folk traditions, Walcott's plays include Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), The Joker of Seville (1975), A Branch of the Blue Nile (1986), while his verse collections include In a Green Night (1962), the autobiographical Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976) and Midsummer (1984).
Professor Xi Mi from the University of California in Los Angeles will be the host of the colloquium, while Taiwan poets Lee Kuei-hsien and Lee Min-yung, and professor Tseng Chen-chen of National Dong Hwa University and Lin Jui-ming, director of the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature, will join Walcott for the discussion, according to the museum spokesman.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS