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| Writer of Original Story John Robert Lee |
John Robert Lee graduated from the University of the West Indies with a First Class Degree. He also studied a number of post-graduate courses in Librarianship. He is a St. Lucian writer who has published several collections of poetry. His short stories and poems can be found in many journals and international anthologies. These include Facing the sea (1986), The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse (1986), The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990), The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). He continues to present radio and television interviews, focusing on persons – local, regional and international – involved in the arts and culture.
John Robert Lee’s latest publication is elemental: new and selected poems published by the Peepal Tree Press in Leeds, the United Kingdom, in 2008. In 2007 he published Canticles, a collection of poems illustrated with the author’s photographs. Other publications include Artefacts (2000), Saint Lucian (1988) and Vocation (1975). He compiled and edited Roseau Valley and other poems for Brother George Odlum (2003) an anthology representing 50 years of Saint Lucian poetry and art. The book is illustrated with art by leading St. Lucian painters of several generations including Harold Simmons, Dunstan St. Omer, Llewellyn Xavier, Virginia Henry and Corine George.
In 2006, he co-edited with Kendel Hippolyte Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an anthology of reviews, which is recognized as a significant contribution to the documentation of the history of Saint Lucian writing and drama.
In 1993, at the launching of a poetry collection by Lee entitled Translations, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott said of his younger contemporary, “Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet; that’s the biggest virtue he has, and it’s not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don’t get in the poetry anything that is, in sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet.”