Derek Walcott slams VS Naipaul in verse

WALCOTT VS NAIPAUL: The Nobel Prize-winning poet mocked Naipaul as a mongoose in his poem.

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London: Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott has hit out at VS Naipaul in a manner he knows best – verse.

The poet who told the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica that he was going to be ‘nasty', before mocking Naipul as a mongoose in a poem he composed, reports the Telegraph.

"I have been bitten. I must avoid infection. Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction," the poem opens.

He also attacks Naipaul's later novels Half a Life and Magic Seeds, with the words: "The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly. The anti-hero is a prick named Willie."

This is not the first time that the two Nobel winners have been at odds. Walcott has once called "VS Nightfall" in verse.

Walcott has been vocal about what he thinks about Naipaul’s rejection of his Caribbean heritage.

He was particularly outraged when Naipaul, whose ancestors were Indian labourers who moved to Trinidad in the 19th century, thanked Britain and India in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, but not the country of his birth.

Patrick French, Naipaul's biographer, said: "Knowing Naipaul, he'll say nothing and then at some point he will lash out. He said to me once, 'I settle all my accounts'."