John Robert Lee

Read an exclusive interview with John Robert Lee by Caribbean Writers and Poets

John Robert Lee was born, and lives in St Lucia. He is the author of three collections of poetry,  elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). His poems are included in a number of international anthologies and periodicals including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, and The Missing Slate. He has also published short stories in anthologies such as The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, and Facing the Sea. He edited a St. Lucian anthology of poetry and art spanning fifty years, Roseau Valley and other poems, and with his younger colleague Kendel Hippolyte, he compiled and edited an anthology of reviews covering the history of St. Lucian literature and theatre, (Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an anthology of reviews. His reviews and columns appear widely, and he produced and presented radio and television programmes in Saint Lucia for many years. 

“Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that’s the biggest virtue that 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 a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet.”  

—Derek Walcott, Nobel Laureate 1992