Wasafiri Wonders: Gavin Herbertson
We spoke to Gavin Herbertson, winnner of the 2025 Wasafiri Essay Prize, about his winning essay, 'Interleafing the Philoctetes Figure: Derek Walcott’s Omeros and The Isle is Full of Noises'.
An Assistant Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at SWPS University, Warsaw, and an Early Career Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, Gavin's research focuses on modernism, colonial and postcolonial aesthetics, and cross-cultural literary form, with particular attention to Caribbean and global modernist contexts.
In your 2025 Wasafiri Essay Prize-winning paper, 'Interleafing the Philoctetes Figure: Derek Walcott’s Omeros and The Isle is Full of Noises', you focus on two works by Walcott. What is your all-time favourite work by the Saint Lucian poet and playwright, and why?
There is a sonnet called 'A City’s Death by Fire' that Walcott wrote in 1948 in response to Castries (the capital of Saint Lucia) burning to the ground. It’s the text I return to most often, largely because he was still a teenager when he wrote it.
What I love about the poem is its use of what Patricia Ismond calls 'metaphoric transference', where you develop a series of metaphors with the same referent but changing associations. His speaker begins by describing writing about the fire by candlelight, the flame likened to an eye, and the dripping wax framed as tears. He then suggests he wants to write about the event in 'more than wax', implying a permanence beyond the erasable wax of a Roman schoolchild’s tablet. Later, he asks why a man should 'wax tears' when his 'wooden world fails', with 'wax' carrying the sense it has in the phrase 'wax lyrical'. The cumulative effect is that 'wax' seems to drip down the poem, mirroring what it describes. That Walcott was able to carry this off at such a young age is frankly incredible.
When did you first encounter Derek Walcott’s work — and what about it most resonated with you?
I first encountered Walcott’s work at the end of my first year as an undergraduate and was blown away by it. I’d taken Omeros to read on a trip to the Caribbean, which no doubt helped, and was astounded by how precisely he managed to capture the feeling of the place.
I was struck especially by the confidence of his style, how freely he brought Dante and Homer into dialogue with Saint Lucian flora, fauna, and speech. There’s a section towards the end of the poem where the speaker draws an extended comparison between writing about an odyssey and journeying on one, likening the 'I' to a mast and the pen to an oar in the sea. I remember thinking it was the best thing I’d ever read.
You use ‘interleafing’ as both a formal strategy and analytical framework in the paper to discuss Derek Walcott, Homer, Shakespeare, and James Joyce. Of the four literary giants, who would you most love to have a conversation with, and what would you discuss?
I’d like to meet Shakespeare to see if I could either coax him into outing himself as an actor hired by the Earl of Oxford, or wrangle a signed copy of Love’s Labour’s Won.
More seriously, I’d have to say Walcott. My thesis was a single-author study focused on his early work, and a lot of the articles I’ve published since have looked at his aesthetics. I’ve had discussions with his former colleagues and close family, but getting a chance to meet him would have been invaluable. He had something of a reputation for self-fashioning in interviews, famously claiming he’d never read Homer’s work all the way through, and I’d want to figure out how seriously to take that kind of claim.
Here are two quotes from your essay:
‘For the Caribbean islands to remedy their ills on a societal level, individuals must work to fix the damage these ills have occasioned on a personal, psychological level' and ‘Walcott’s vision of healing is explicitly communal.’ Looking at Walcott’s oeuvre, how would you say he explores the personal and the communal?
What I really enjoy about Walcott is his ability to write so unapologetically from within his own experience. There’s an entire set of associations specific to his oeuvre, where the same episodes from his life often repeat in new forms. Taken collectively, this hyper-focus on individual experience paradoxically constitutes a form of world-building. It’s part of what makes his work difficult for new readers, but it’s also what makes it so rewarding.
Walcott was always wary of the idea that his art somehow represented the wider 'Caribbean experience', not least because he was an anglophone Methodist who attended a grammar school and moved overseas, meaning his experience was not typical for a Saint Lucian.
In your paper, you talk about repetition and return. Which academic work or writer/scholar do you find yourself returning to often in your research?
The scholar whose work I find I return to the most is Jahan Ramazani. I built explicitly on his argument concerning Philoctetes’s wound in my essay for Wasafiri, and my research is very much aligned with his wider goal of bridging the disciplinary divides between global modernism, postcolonialism, and world literature. For anybody who hasn’t encountered his work before, I’d recommend starting with the essay ‘Modernist Inflections, Postcolonial Directions’ (2015), which provides an exemplary survey of the intersections of the fields, before moving onto Poetry in a Global Age (2020). A Transnational Poetics (2009) and The Hybrid Muse (2001) are also both fantastic.
Who do you think are the most exciting scholars working in the field of Caribbean literary studies right now? Are there some recently published academic monographs/texts, either within or beyond the field, that you would recommend to our readers?
The strain of research I’m most excited about challenges the conventional narrative for Caribbean literary development. Broadly, that story is that there was little of value before the 1950s in prose and 1960s in poetry, when the Windrush novelists (Selvon, Lamming), Naipaul, Walcott, and Brathwaite all emerged. The earliest work they produced was imitative of Anglo-European language and forms, until a period of divergence took place in the 1970s, with fully regional aesthetics realised in the 1980s, at which point female writers like Jamaica Kincaid enter the picture.
Alison Donnell was the first critic to challenge this narrative in a sustained way, and her monograph Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (2006) makes essential reading. Her recently published article 'An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean' (2025) is another excellent piece in this vein.
Do you believe academic writing should be more accessible to wider audiences?
I think we could certainly get better at disseminating our ideas beyond the academy, and that writing more accessibly would help. Technical terminology can be extremely useful because it can compress an idea that might otherwise take a paragraph into a single word or phrase with a very precise meaning, but it can also often obscure what the author is trying to say.
Many literature departments are facing funding challenges right now, and one reason for this is that the work they do is not always understood outside of the field. I think half the people I know assume I write novels or poetry for a living. If we got better at sharing our ideas with a broader audience, it would go a long way toward addressing the issue.
What is the best advice you’ve received on writing?
Content-wise, I remember an undergraduate tutor of mine once wrote 'this would be ingenious, if I believed it, which I don’t, because it’s s**t' on an essay I’d submitted. I took this to mean: don’t try to make a point because you think it sounds clever, make it because you think it’s true.
In terms of style, there’s an essay by George Orwell that I often return to called 'Politics and the English Language', which breaks down some examples of especially bad academic writing and explains how they could be improved. At the end of the essay, Orwell outlines six rules for good academic writing in English which, in my view, are very helpful.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Cover image: Illustrated by Simone Khanyi Hadebe
