Walcott lampoons Naipaul in verse

For years Derek Walcott, the St Lucian poet, has traded insults with Sir Vidia Naipaul (pictured), who like himself is a winner of the Nobel prize for literature. Now, he has upped the anti, lampooning his old sparring partner in a delightfully bitchy poem that attacks the Trinidadian-born author’s alleged rejection of his Caribbean heritage.

He gave his first recital of the work, which is called The Mongoose, at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend, amidst howls of laughter from a knowing audience. "I have been bitten. I must avoid infection/ Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction," run the opening lines.

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

As yet, Naipaul has yet to return fire on Walcott, but he has experience of dealing with critics. He once dismissed the distinguished American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, who wrote a book about him, as a writer of "tourist books for the lower classes".