Tom Redcam

Donna-Marie Tuck (University of Nottingham)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 4.1.1: Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean.
Vol. editors: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin), Jak Peake (University of Essex), Abigail Ward (University of Nottingham)

Dates

Born 1870
Died 1933
Activity 1890-1933

Places

Born in Jamaica
Active in Jamaica

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Poet

Resources

Thomas Henry MacDermot was Jamaica’s first Poet Laureate and founder of a distinct line of Jamaican poetry that drew “its life and colour from Jamaica’s sun and air” (MacFarlane, xxi). Although recognised by W. Adolphe Roberts as Jamaica’s “first native-born literary journalist, her first important poet to be inspired by history, and the scene about him, her first critic who believed in the rightness of having a literature distinct from other lands” (Six Great Jamaicans, 86), he, along with other early Caribbean writers, has suffered from relative scholarly neglect. Writing under the pseudonym “Tom Redcam”, he was also editor of the nationalistically leaning The Jamaica Times (1900-1920), during which time he was able to facilitate the establishment of a distinct literary tradition and inspire future literary production in the region by printing locally written literature...

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1846 words

Citation: Tuck, Donna-Marie. "Tom Redcam". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 October 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3726, accessed 09 June 2026.]