Margaret Bennett is a Scottish writer, folklorist, ethnologist, broadcaster, and singer. Her main interests lies in the field of traditional Scottish folk culture and cultural identity of the Scots in Scotland and abroad. The late Hamish Henderson, internationally distinguished poet and folklorist, said about her: Margaret embodies 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 1963–1964, 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 1967–68. 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 1977–1984, 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. 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.
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".
Works
The Last Stronghold: Scottish Gaelic Traditions in Newfoundland . Canongate Books Ltd, Breakwater Books Ltd, 1989 / -, -
Oatmeal and the Catechism: Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec . McGill Queens University Press, Birlinn, 1999, 2002, 2004. –,,, -, –,
