Nuevo listening de nuestra profesora Anitra, del Servicio de Idiomas de la Universidad de Murcia. Aprende inglés con la Universidad de Murcia.
Texto del listening:
Hello everyone, this is 'Aprende Idiomas con el Servicio de Idiomas de la Universidad de Murcia', and in this podcast we will be talking about ‘Caribbean authors’.
Literature in the West Indies provides one of the most intricate and eye-opening expressions of Caribbean identity and culture. Authors in the region have employed various techniques to captivate their audiences, and their works abound with haunting aspects of history, gripping tales of love and betrayal, and quirky stories of modern-day life. The international world has given kudos to numerous Caribbean writers for their work in this field. For example, Derek Alton Walcott, who was born in 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 for his poetry that related the Caribbean's physical appeal, the cruelty of colonialism and the difficulty of living and writing while being surrounded by different cultures. His father was a Bohemian watercolourist who died when he was a young child and his mother directed the Methodist school in his town. It is said that both of Walcott's grandmothers were descendants of slaves and that being raised in the small volcanic Windward Island greatly impacted Walcott's life and writings. He studied at St. Mary's College in St Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. In 1953 he moved further south in the Caribbean to the island of Trinidad and worked in theatre and arts, founding the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, where he produced a large section of his early plays. He started out at the age of 18 with his work 25 Poems, and one of his most acclaimed early works is In a Green Night which is a book of poems from 1962. For this work he was identified as a shining light in literature in the region with poetry that produced clear visual images and musicality. Another Caribbean born Nobel Prize winner is V.S. Naipaul, who received the award in 2001, for ' having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories'. He was born in Trinidad in 1932 and was a descendant of indentured labourers who were shipped to the West Indies from India. Naipaul wrote over 30 books, including A Bend in the River and the world-renowned A House for Mr Biswas, a 1961 novel whose Indo-Trinidadian protagonist Mohun Biswas repeatedly fails at his attempts for success and his aims to own his own house. This story extracts some aspects from the past of Naipaul's father, and is written from a postcolonial point of view. It was also mentioned in the American Time magazine's 'TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005'. Men are not the only members of Caribbean society who have been recognised for their literary accomplishments. Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean American writer who was born in the small Leeward island of Antigua in 1949 as Elaine Potter Richardson. Her writings showcase aspects of her own family relationships and colonialism in the country of her birth in novels such as Annie John published in 1984, roughly 3 years after Antigua became independent from Britain, and Lucy published in 1990. Her novels The Autobiography of My Mother followed in 1996, My Brother in 1997, and Mr Potter in 2002. These are just a few of the authors from the list of great West Indian writers.
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