Una Marson (Una Maud Marson) Biography

Jamaican poet, playwright, and broadcaster, born in Jamaica, and educated there and at Hampton School, Malvern. She went to England in 1932, where she became secretary to the League of Coloured Peoples, and private secretary to Haile Selassie, the exiled Ethiopian Emperor. During her second period in England (1938–47) she was a broadcaster with the BBC. As an author, she is best known for her poetry, which was published in Tropic Reveries (1930), Heights and Depths (1931), and The Moth and the Star (1937). Her collection Towards the Stars (1945) includes many of the poems of earlier collections. She experimented to great effect in vernacular and ‘blues’ poems, but was equally fluent in more formal style, such as the tersely epigrammatic ‘Politeness’.