Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Louise Bennett’s writing and performance career began as the Caribbean literary landscape was evolving in the twentieth century, through the beginnings of critical evaluation in the 1930s, the burgeoning of writing in the 1950s, and the scholarly and critical attention of the 1960s and 1970s. Crucially, Bennett is situated in the cultural and literary environment of the period before and after Jamaican independence in 1962. She was a poet, a performance poet, a chronicler, a commentator, a broadcaster, a storyteller, and a paremiologist. Throughout her substantial corpus of work – textual and performative – Bennett wrote exclusively in Creole. In doing so, Bennett was a visionary who valorised Jamaican culture and demonstred that Creole could be a…
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Citation: Lobban, Aileen. "Louise Bennett". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 December 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=364, accessed 18 January 2025.]
