Una Marson

Una Maud Victoria Marson was born on 6 February 1905 in rural Jamaica, the youngest child of a Baptist minister, and by age 21 had become assistant editor of the Jamaica Critic before founding her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan, in 1928, becoming Jamaica's first woman editor-publisher.

Marson travelled to London in 1932, where she became active in Pan-African and anti-colonial circles, worked with Harold Moody's League of Coloured Peoples, and published poetry collections including The Moth and the Star that explored racism, isolation and women's marginalisation.

Returning to England in 1938, Marson joined the BBC, and by 1941 had become the corporation's first Black woman broadcaster, working as programme assistant on Calling the West Indies, a wartime series connecting Caribbean service members and workers in Britain with their families back home.

In 1942 Marson became producer of the renamed Caribbean Voices, transforming it into a landmark literary forum that gave early broadcast exposure to Caribbean writers, a programme that continued for fifteen years after her departure and helped launch the careers of writers including George Lamming, Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul.

Marson returned to Jamaica in 1946 due to declining health, continuing to write plays and poetry until her death from a heart attack in 1965; her biographer has described her as the first Black British feminist to speak out publicly against both racism and sexism in Britain.