Henry Swanzy
| Henry Swanzy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Henry Valentine Leonard Swanzy 14 June 1915 Glanmire rectory, near Cork, Ireland |
| Died | 19 March 2004 (aged 88) Bishop's Stortford, England |
| Occupation | Radio producer |
| Known for | Producer of BBC programme Caribbean Voices |
Henry Swanzy (14 June 1915 – 19 March 2004) was an Anglo-Irish radio producer in Britain's BBC General Overseas Service who is best known for his role in promoting West Indian literature particularly through the programme Caribbean Voices, where in 1946 he took over from Una Marson, the programme's first producer. Swanzy introduced unpublished writers and continued the magazine programme "with energy, critical insight and generosity". It is widely acknowledged that "his influence on the development of Caribbean literature has been tremendous".
Born Henry Valentine Leonard Swanzy at Glanmire rectory, near Cork in Ireland, he was the eldest son of the local clergyman and his wife. After his father's death in 1920, the five-year-old Swanzy moved to England with his mother.
He was educated at preparatory schools in Cheltenham and Eastbourne before going on to Wellington College in 1928. He read History at New College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree, and he also won the Gibbs Prize. For a year thereafter, planning a career as a civil servant, he studied French and German and travelled throughout Europe, then in 1937, aged 22, he was employed at the Colonial and Dominions Office, joining the BBC four years later.
Swanzy began working for the BBC during the war, reporting for the General Overseas Service. He took over Caribbean Voices after Una Marson, the programme's original architect and first producer, returned to Jamaica in April 1946, and he remained at the helm until 1954.
Swanzy, it has been noted, "had a great respect for Caribbean writers as representing a legitimate and distinctive element of British literature." Writing in Caribbean Quarterly in 1949, he said: "It is not inconceivable that of all the English-speaking world, the West Indies may be revealed as the place most suited for maintenance of a literary tradition." He went on to make his mark on the literature of the region, in collaboration with Frank Collymore of BIM magazine, by providing a platform through the programme for some of the most notable Caribbean literary talent of the twentieth century. As Montague Kobbe writes: "...it is hard to overemphasise the tremendous influence which Henry Swanzy, editor to Caribbean Voices from 1946 onwards, would exert in the development of a literary tradition that was in its earliest stages. The other initiative in question corresponds, of course, to the emergence of Frank Collymore’s audacious magazine, BIM. Launched in Barbados in 1942, BIM encouraged young local writers to put forward their work and quickly established a fruitful rapport with the literary findings uncovered by Swanzy’s Caribbean Voices, establishing a cultural infrastructure of sorts that had its local nucleus in Collymore’s magazine and its international outlet in the BBC."
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