Fred D’Aguiar

2 weeks ago | the-tls.co.uk | Fred D’Aguiar |Tom Evans |Libby Purves |Eimear McBride

Born in 1905 in a village west of Kingston, Jamaica, Una Marson had an idyllic childhood in some respects. The youngest of six, a favourite of her father, the local parson, and with an Irish antecedent in her maternal grandfather, Marson sang her way through church and shone at school. But the strictures of colourism, thanks to the vestiges of plantation slavery in the British colony, meant that the dark-skinned Una struggled among her light-skinned peers at her elite school.