33 Recipients of the Musgrave Medal

The Musgrave Medal is an annual award by the Institute of Jamaica in recognition of achievement in art, science, and literature. Originally conceived in 1889 and named in memory of Sir Anthony Musgrave, the founder of the Institute and the former Governor of Jamaica who had died the previous year, the medal was the first to be awarded in the Western Hemisphere.

Peter Henry Abrahams Deras, commonly known as Peter Abrahams, was a South African-born novelist, journalist and political commentator who in 1956 settled in Jamaica, where he lived for the rest of his life. His death at the age of 97 is considered to have been murder.

Montgomery Bernard "Monty" Alexander is a Jamaican jazz pianist. His playing has a Caribbean influence and bright swinging feeling, with a strong vocabulary of bebop jazz and blues rooted melodies. He was influenced by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, and Frank Sinatra. Alexander also sings and plays the melodica. He is known for his surprising musical twists, bright rhythmic sense, and intense dramatic musical climaxes. Monty's recording career has covered many of the well known American songbook standards, jazz standards, pop hits, and Jamaican songs from his original homeland. Alexander has resided in New York City for many years and performs frequently throughout the world at jazz festivals and clubs.

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou, OM, OJ, MBE, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois, establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression.

Christopher Percy Gordon Blackwell is an English businessman and former record producer, and the founder of Island Records, which has been called "one of Britain's great independent labels". According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which Blackwell was inducted in 2001, he is "the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music."

James Bond was an American ornithologist and expert on the birds of the Caribbean, having written the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies, first published in 1936. He served as a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. His name was appropriated by writer Ian Fleming for his fictional British spy of the same name.

The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB, was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

Jean "Binta" Breeze MBE was a Jamaican dub poet and storyteller, acknowledged as the first woman to write and perform dub poetry. She worked also as a theatre director, choreographer, actor, and teacher. She performed her work around the world, in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South-East Asia, and Africa, and has been called "one of the most important, influential performance poets of recent years".

Erna Brodber is a Jamaican writer, sociologist and social activist. She is the sister of writer Velma Pollard.

Clement Seymour "Coxsone" Dodd was a Jamaican record producer who was influential in the development of ska and reggae in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond.

Fae Ellington, CD, OD, is a Jamaican media personality and lecturer best known for hosting the television series Morning Time on JBC for more than twelve years.

Gloria Escoffery OD was a Jamaican painter, poet and art critic active in the 1940s and 1950s.

Dean Ivanhoe Fraser is a Jamaican saxophonist who has contributed to hundreds of reggae recordings since the mid-1970s. He was awarded the Musgrave Medal by the Jamaican government in 1993 in recognition of his services to music.

Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey was the Jamaican-born second wife of Marcus Garvey, and a journalist and activist in her own right. She was one of the pioneering female Black journalists and publishers of the 20th century.

Alice Mary Hagen was a Canadian ceramic artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was trained in china painting, and earned her living through selling painted chinaware and teaching. She was among the artists selected to paint plates for the 1897 Canadian Historical Dinner Service. She gained a high reputation for the quality of her work, for which she won various prizes. She married happily and had two daughters. She continued to paint china while raising her family in Canada and Jamaica. When she was about sixty and her husband had retired she learned to make pottery at her studio in Nova Scotia, and was a pioneer of studio pottery in the area. She continued to produce and sell painted pottery until she was aged 93. Many ceramic artists acknowledged their debt to Alice Hagen as a teacher and an example.

Dr. Myrna Hague-Bradshaw, better known as Myrna Hague, known as "Jamaica's First Lady of Jazz", is a Jamaican lovers rock and jazz singer and actress, who recorded for Coxsone Dodd's Studio One.

Dorothy Henriques-Wells was a Jamaican painter and art teacher. She is known for her sparse, vibrant watercolors depicting the plants and landscapes of Jamaica. She has works in the National Gallery of Jamaica and she received the Silver Musgrave Medal for Art in 1987. Henriques-Wells graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1951, where she was the institution's first Black alumna. She taught art at Jamaican high schools and colleges for over two decades.

Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of four novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019). Now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the U.S., James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, also known as LKJ, is a Jamaican dub poet and activist who has been based in the United Kingdom since 1963. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only black poet, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His performance poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with renowned British reggae producer/artist Dennis Bovell.

Lloyd Knibb OD was a Jamaican drummer who is considered Jamaica's most important and influential modern drummer. A master percussionist, he contributed to every style of this nation's popular and not so popular musical forms, including jazz, mento, burru, nyabinghi, rock steady and, by extension, reggae. He is most well known for his contribution to the development of the rhythm of the ska. He played for The Skatalites, and for Tommy McCook & The Supersonics. Knibb recorded for the producers Lloyd "Matador" Daley and Duke Reid.

Edna Swithenbank Manley, OM is considered one of the most important artists and arts educators in Jamaica. She was known primarily as a sculptor although her oeuvre included significant drawings and paintings. Her work forms an important part of the National Gallery of Jamaica's permanent collection and can be viewed in other public institutions in Jamaica such as Bustamante Children's Hospital, the University of the West Indies, and the Kingston Parish Church.

Alvin Tolman Marriott was a Jamaican sculptor. He worked in Europe, North and Central America, and Jamaica. Many of his carvings and statues are on public display and in administrative buildings in Jamaica and the UK.

Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.

Festus Claudius McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Orlando Patterson OM is a Jamaican-born American historical and cultural sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race in the United States, as well as the sociology of development. He is a professor at Harvard University. His book Freedom, Volume One, or Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Lee "Scratch" Perry was a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. He worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, The Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, Beastie Boys, Ari Up, The Clash, The Orb, and many others.

Victor Stafford Reid, OJ, was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver (1950) and gold (1976) Musgrave Medals, the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children; one play production; and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - "the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form" - and The Leopard.

Mallica Reynolds, OD, better known by the adopted name "Kapo", was a Jamaican artist and religious leader. Considered one of the greatest artists in Jamaica's "Intuitives" artistic movement, Kapo's religious beliefs were reflected in his work.

Emmanuel "Rico" Rodriguez, also known as Rico, Reco or El Reco, was a Cuban-born Jamaican ska and reggae trombonist. He recorded with producers such as Karl Pitterson, Prince Buster, and Lloyd Daley. He was known as one of the first ska musicians. Beginning in the 1960s, he worked with The Members, The Specials, Jools Holland, and Paul Young.

Sly and Robbie are a prolific Jamaican rhythm section and production duo, associated primarily with the reggae and dub genres. Drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare teamed up in the mid-1970s after establishing themselves separately in Jamaica as professional musicians.

Earl "Chinna" Smith, a.k.a. Earl Flute and Melchezidek the High Priest, is a Jamaican guitarist active since the late 1960s. He is most well known for his work with the Soul Syndicate band and has recorded with many reggae artists, appearing on more than 500 albums.

Michael Garfield Smith OM was a Jamaican social anthropologist and poet of international repute.

Anthony C. Winkler was a successful Jamaican novelist and popular contributor to many post-secondary English literary texts. His first novel The Painted Canoe (1986), although taking the most time to write and publish, was his most rewarding, allowing him to move on and produce his best known book, The Lunatic (1987), which earned him a spot on the bestseller list. He also co-authored a number of English grammar textbooks, and other non-fiction works.