Louise Bennett-Coverley

Louise Simone Bennett was born on the seventh of September 1919 at Kingston, Jamaica, the only child of Augustus Bennett — a Black Jamaican baker who died of pneumonia when she was seven — and Kerene Robinson Bennett, a dressmaker. She was educated at St. Simon's College at Kingston and at the Excelsior High School. She left the secondary school at sixteen and pursued informally the recovery of Jamaican folk-tradition that would across the following six decades define her career.

She began performing publicly at fifteen in the Jamaican folk-poetry tradition — at the rural-district storytelling sessions and at the Anancy-story public readings of the late 1930s. She published her first volume of dialect poetry Dialect Verses in 1942 at twenty-three. The volume — selected poems written in the Jamaican Creole rather than in standard English — was the first literary collection in Jamaican publication history to treat the Creole as a serious literary medium rather than as a comic dialect.

She travelled to London in 1945 on a British Council scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she completed the diploma in dramatic art in 1947. She lived in London from 1945 to 1955 and conducted across the period the BBC programmes Caribbean Carnival and Calling the Caribbean — the cultural-affairs broadcasts that complemented Una Marson's (placed in this archive) Caribbean Voices literary programme. She returned to Jamaica in 1955 as the Drama Officer of the Jamaica Social Welfare Commission.

She wrote and presented from 1965 the long-running Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation children's programme Ring Ding — broadcast continuously through 1982 — and the adult radio programme Miss Lou's Views from the same period. The two programmes consolidated her national status as the principal Jamaican folk voice of the late twentieth century. Her published verse collections — Jamaica Labrish of 1966 and Selected Poems of 1982 — established the formal Jamaican Creole canon as a recognised literary tradition.

She was awarded the Order of Jamaica in 1974 and the Jamaican Order of Merit in 2001 — the highest civilian honour of the country.

She died at Toronto on the twenty-sixth of July 2006, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as Miss Lou.