Edna Manley OM (Jamaica) (née Swithenbank) (1900-1987) was an English-born Jamaican artist and social activist. Born to an English father and Jamaican mother, she married her cousin Norman Manley and moved to Jamaica in 1922. Two children, both sons, were born to that marriage, Michael who was to become a union activist and eventually prime minister, and Douglas, a sociologist and minister in his brother's government.
When her husband became leader of the People's National Party, in the wake of the worker uprising of 1938, she became a public figure both as an artist committed to producing works centred on Jamaica (most notably the figure 'Negro Aroused') and as a promoter of Jamaican literary culture through the journal Focus, which she edited in the 1940s and 1950s.
Active for much of her life as an artist, she also taught at the Jamaica School of Art (now a component of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts).
Works
- Whisper
- Into The Mist
- Before Thought
- Moon
- Into The Sun
- Growth
- The Ancestor
- The Mother
- Negro Aroused
- Diggers
- Man and Woman
- Bead Sellers