Margaret Bennett (writer)
Margaret Bennett is a Scottish, writer, folklorist, ethnologist, broadcaster, and singer. Having spent much of her life living between Scotland and Canada, her work concerns traditional Scottish folk culture and the cultural identity of the Scots abroad. Her close friend and mentor, the Scottish poet Hamish Henderson, considered Bennett "one of the major figures of the modern Scottish revival...Margaret embodies all that is best of the spirit of Scotland".
Biography
Margaret Bennett grew up in a family of tradition bearers: Gaelic, from her mother's side, and Irish and Lowland Scots from her father's. She and her three sisters lived their childhood in the Isle of Skye, "in a household where singing, playing music, dancing and storytelling were a way of life as were traditional crafts." The family moved to the Isle of Lewis in the late 1950s, and then to the Shetland Islands between 1963 and 1964, when her father emigrated to Newfoundland, Canada. When visiting him in 1965, she came across the newly founded Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland. There, under the direction of Prof. Herbert Halpert, she realised that her cultural heritage "was a subject you could actually study and get a degree in."After finishing her teacher training in Scotland with distinction, Bennett returned to Newfoundland, where she worked as an elementary school teacher in St. John's between 1967 and 1968. From 1968 she attended the University, intermittently lecturing part-time at St. John's Vocational College, then, in 1975, earned a post-graduate MA from M.U.N. She spent a year in Quebec as folklorist for the Museum of Man before returning to Scotland. Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a special education teacher in the Scottish Education Department. From 1984 to 1995, she was lecturer in Scottish Ethnology at the School of Scottish Studies of the University of Edinburgh. In 1988, she was involved in the re-initiation of the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. Since October 1995 she has been Glasgow Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow and lecturer in folklore at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.
She is the mother of the late Martyn Bennett.
Academic life
- 1967: Dip Ed, Jordanhill College of Education, Glasgow.
- 1970: she received a BA in Education from the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St. John's.
- 1975: she earned a post-graduate MA in Folklore from M.U.N. defending her thesis "Some Aspects of the Scottish Gaelic Traditions of the Codroy Valley, Newfoundland", where she records and analyses the traditions of the Gaelic-speaking settlers in the Codroy Valley.
- 1994: she achieved a PhD in Ethnology from the University of Edinburgh with a thesis entitled "Hebridean Traditions of the Eastern Townships of Quebec: A Study in Cultural Identity".