Edward Baugh, is Professor Emeritus of English, UWI, Mona. His scholarly and critical publications on West Indian literature include: Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (Longman, 1978), Derek Walcott (Cambridge, 2006) and Frank Collymore: a Biography (Ian Randle, 2009). His three collections of poetry include, most recently, Black Sand: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree, 2013).
Based at the Cave Hill, Barbados, campus from 1965 to 1967, then at Mona, Jamaica, Baugh is best known as a scholar of Caribbean poetry, in particular the poetry of Derek Walcott, having written several books devoted to the work of the St Lucian Nobel Laureate. He also edited Walcott’s 2007 Selected Poems. In his book West Indian Poetry 1900–1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation, and in his broad-ranging scholarly essays — such as the groundbreaking “Towards a West Indian Criticism” and “The West Indian Writer and his Quarrel with History” — Baugh helped shape a distinctly Caribbean approach to criticism of the region’s literature, grounded in the Caribbean’s unique historical experiences.
