Una Marson

Poet, playwright, publisher.

Campaigner, broadcaster, journalist.

She was six people in one, but if we've heard of Una Marson, it's usually because of her brief shining moment during the Second World War when she became the voice and face of the Caribbean through her pioneering work at the BBC.

Tune in to hear about the six lives of Una Marson as Oswin and Carla are joined by her biographer and Orwell Prize winner, Dee Jarrett-Macauley. It's a tale of a young woman who came to represent a whole region, a whole continent even – and who sometimes found that burden too heavy to shake off.

It's an inspirational story, it's a sad one too. But it's a story of our times – when the personal and the political become one.

Una commanding an editorial meeting in 1942 – T.S. Eliot is sitting at her right hand and George Orwell standing at her shoulder. Around her are the Indian writer Venu Chitale, the Tamil poet Meary Tambimuttu, Orwell’s secretary Nancy Barratt, the great Mulk Raj Anand, the critic William Empson, the BBC announcer Christopher Pemberton and the Indian art critic V.K. Narayana Menon.