Mervyn Morris

Mervyn Morris, co-recipient of the 2021 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, is a Jamaican poet and professor emeritus at UWI, Mona. He has championed Caribbean oral poetry traditions from early in his career. His 1964 essay “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously”, was a landmark in scholarly attention to the literature of Jamaican Patwa, which Morris extended in the 1970s to the growing number of Jamaican dub poets. Many of his key earlier essays are collected in the book Is English We Speaking. Morris also mentored several generations of Jamaican poets, editing and anthologising their work. In 2014 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica — the first since Independence — in which role he worked to raise the profile of poetry across the country, highlighting the work of younger writers.