Louise Bennett-Coverley

Louise Simone Bennett was born on the seventh of September 1919 in Kingston, Jamaica, the only child of Augustus Cornelius Bennett, a baker, and Kerene Robinson, a dressmaker. Her father died in 1926, when Louise was about six, and she was raised thereafter by her mother, whose needle and thread sustained the household.

From girlhood she was drawn to the rhythms of the street, the market, and the yard — the living speech of Jamaica that the schools of her day dismissed as broken English. She took that dismissed tongue and made it a serious literary instrument. Writing and performing in Jamaican Creole, she insisted that "nation language" was worthy of poetry, of the stage, and of the page. In 1945 she won a British Council scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Known affectionately as Miss Lou, she gathered folk songs, proverbs, and stories, and gave them back to her people with wit and dignity. Her landmark collection Jamaica Labrish appeared in 1966, and through radio, television, and the theatre she became the beloved keeper of Jamaican folk culture. In 1954 she married Eric Winston Coverley, a partnership that endured until his death in 2002.

Honoured with the Order of Merit and the Order of Jamaica, she died on the twenty-sixth of July 2006 in Toronto and was laid to rest among her nation's cultural icons in National Heroes Park. She taught a whole people to hear their own voice as beautiful — and that gift outlives her.