Anthony Winkler

Anthony C. Winkler was a Jamaican novelist, screenwriter, and textbook author whose comic fiction made him one of the bestselling Caribbean writers of his generation. Born in Kingston in 1942 to a white Jamaican family, he attended school in Kingston and Montego Bay before moving to the United States, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English at California State University, Los Angeles. He lived most of his adult life in Atlanta, Georgia, and died there in 2015 at the age of 73.

His novels are all set in Jamaica, and use comedy as a way into the country's class and race divides between the 1950s and the 1970s. His debut, The Painted Canoe, took more than ten years to find a publisher and finally came out through Kingston Publishers in 1984. His second novel, The Lunatic (1987), made him a household name in Jamaica. The story of a homeless poet named Aloysius and his entanglement with a German tourist is bawdy, satirical, and beneath the laughter, a sharp critique of postcolonial Jamaican society. It was adapted into a film in 1991.

His other novels include The Great Yacht Race, The Duppy, Dog War, Crocodile, God Carlos, and The Family Mansion. His original screenplay The Annihilation of Fish, a love story between a retired Jamaican man and a Mexican-American woman, was filmed in Los Angeles in 1999 with James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder. His autobiographical Going Home to Teach (1995) recounts the year he and his wife Cathy spent at a teacher-training college in Jamaica during the late 1970s.

Outside fiction, Winkler made his living writing English grammar and composition textbooks. The Writing Talk series, co-authored with Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell, has been used in American college English programs for decades and is the work many writing students know him by, even without realizing he is the same person who wrote The Lunatic. The National Library of Jamaica holds his archives.