Una Marson

Una Maud Victoria Marson was born on the sixth of February 1905 at Sharon Mission House, in the village of Sharon near Santa Cruz, in the parish of Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica. She was the youngest of six children of the Reverend Solomon Isaac Marson, a Baptist minister, and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins. Raised in a devout and cultivated middle-class household, she came early to books, music, and the conviction that a woman's voice belonged in public life.

By her twenties she had made herself a pioneer. She served as assistant editor of the Jamaica Critic, and in 1928 founded and edited The Cosmopolitan — becoming Jamaica's first woman to publish and edit her own magazine — giving voice to feminism, workers' rights, and local social concerns. Her first poetry collection, Tropic Reveries (1930), earned the Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, and was followed by Heights and Depths (1932), The Moth and the Star (1937), and Towards the Stars (1945). She also wrote for the stage, including At What a Price and Pocomania.

Travelling to London in 1932, Marson entered the heart of Britain's Black intellectual and anti-colonial world, working with Harold Moody's League of Coloured Peoples and editing its journal The Keys. During the Second World War she joined the BBC, becoming its first Black woman programme producer. From the wartime programme Calling the West Indies she shaped Caribbean Voices, a broadcast that gave a hearing to a rising generation of Caribbean writers and helped bring a new literature into being.

She returned to Jamaica and continued to write and organise until her death in Kingston on the sixth of May 1965. Una Marson opened doors that had never before been opened, and through the airwaves she carried the words of her people to the world. May her voice be honored as long as it is remembered.