Onoto Watanna

Born in Montreal on August 21, 1875, Winnifred Eaton was a Canadian writer and screenwriter of Chinese-British ancestry. She became best known under the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, a Japanese persona she adopted while publishing popular fiction for a wide readership.

She was one of the first North American writers of Asian descent to publish fiction in English, and she wrote prolifically across novels, journalism, and later screen work. Her best-known books include A Japanese Nightingale, and her career eventually extended into Hollywood, where she worked as a screenwriter and editor.

Eaton died on April 8, 1954, in Butte, Montana. Today she is remembered both for her literary success and for the questions her work raises about race, performance, and publishing in North America at the turn of the twentieth century.