According to critic Michael Hughes, MacDermot was "probably the first Jamaican writer to assert the claim of the West Indies to a distinctive place within English-speaking culture,"[2] and his Becka's Buckra Baby[3] as the beginning of modern Caribbean literature.
Jamaican-born Claude McKay (1889–1948) is credited with inspiring France's Negritude (“Blackness”) movement, as well as being a founding father of the Harlem Renaissance.
Una Marson (1905–1965) was well known for her poetry, as well as her activism as a feminist, and for her role as producer of the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices in the 1940s.
Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican patois, Bennett was instrumental in having this "dialect" of the people given literary recognition in its own right ("nation language").
Other Jamaican writers who have gained international acclaim include Hazel Dorothy Campbell (1940–2018), Mikey Smith (1954–1983) and Linton Kwesi Johnson.