Anthony McNeill

Anthony McNeill was born on the seventeenth of December 1941 at Kingston, Jamaica, the eldest of three children of Roy McNeill — a Jamaican politician and physician who would across the 1960s serve as Minister of Home Affairs in the government of Hugh Shearer — and Beryl McNeill, a homemaker. The McNeill household was Black middle-class and politically prominent. He was educated at Excelsior High School in Kingston through 1959 and at St. George's College Cambridge from 1959 to 1962.

He took the bachelor's at the University of the West Indies at Mona from 1962 to 1965 and worked briefly thereafter as a reporter for the Daily Gleaner of Kingston. He completed the Master of Fine Arts at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in 1970 — among the very few Jamaican poets to take an American writing-programme degree of the period — and the Master of Arts in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976.

He published his first collection Reel from The Life Movie in 1972 — the volume of jazz-influenced free-verse poems that established him as the principal Black-Jamaican poetic voice of the post-independence generation alongside Mervyn Morris and Lorna Goodison. The Reel from The Life Movie won the Institute of Jamaica's Silver Musgrave Medal of 1972. He published the second collection Credences at the Altar of Cloud in 1979 — sixty-four interconnected lyric poems addressed to John Coltrane (placed in this archive) — and the third Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child in 1998 posthumously.

He served as research fellow at the Institute of Jamaica from 1972 to 1981 and as a freelance editor and broadcaster from 1981 to 1996. He was twice awarded the Institute of Jamaica's Silver Musgrave Medal and was held in his lifetime as one of the principal voices of the third generation of Anglo-Caribbean poetry — after the Caribbean Voices generation of George Lamming (placed in this archive) and Derek Walcott (placed in this archive), and the Arrivants generation of Kamau Brathwaite (placed in this archive).

He suffered across his last decade from severe mental illness and the substance-use complications that compounded it. The Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child volume was assembled posthumously by Mervyn Morris and Edward Baugh from his unpublished papers.

He was found dead in his Kingston home on the eighteenth of August 1996, at fifty-four.

He is honored here as the Coltrane-influenced poetic voice of post-independence Jamaica.