Thomas MacDermot (26 June 1870[1] – 8 October 1933)[2] was a Jamaican poet, novelist, and editor, editing the Jamaica Times for more than 20 years.
He was "probably the first Jamaican writer to assert the claim of the West Indies to a distinctive place within English-speaking culture".
Thomas Henry MacDermot was born in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the third of five children,[5] and spent much of his childhood in Trelawny.
[4] He worked to promote Jamaican literature through all of his writing, starting a weekly short story contest in the Jamaica Times in 1899. Notable among the young writers he helped and encouraged are Claude McKay[3] and H. G. de Lisser.
He was posthumously proclaimed Jamaica's first Poet Laureate for the period 1910–33 by the Jamaican branch of the Poetry League.