J. A. Wainwright was born in Toronto in 1946. He has lived in England, Spain, and Greece, but mostly in Nova Scotia since 1972. He received a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from Dalhousie University where he is McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English. Influences include: islands, Patrick White novels, and Bob Dylan lyrics. His sixth novel,This Cleaving and This Burning, which won the Guernica Prize in 2019, was publiahed by Guernica Editions in 2020.