Alinka Zyrmont was born in Dundee, Scotland, into a large Lindsay family, and educated in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She arrived in her late teens to the United States where she attended Barry University and studied creative writing with Mrs. Vivian L. Rader, Florida’s Poet Laureate. Later, she enrolled at California College of Law for two years, but when the creative side of her brain dominated her legal writing, she opted for a paralegal certification and withdrew to write her first novel: Husband Hunting..  

 

Deciding to pursue an artistic career instead, she gained her writing experience ghost- writing Anthony Quinn’s autobiography. Now involved in an artistic world, she kept busy modeling, and had walk-on parts in movies such as The Birdcage, filmed in Florida, and Valley of the Sun and Sunset Daze, filmed in Arizona. While studying music, she also worked at West Film in Rome, Italy, preparing contracts in Italian for all the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns.

 

Alinka also sang in productions of The Music Man, Evita, Man of La Mancha, My Fair Lady, and in the chorus of The Miami Opera Guild in performances of La Traviata, Le Nozze di Figaro and Aida. Her most memorable one was with Luciano Pavarotti and Dame Joan Sutherland in Lucia di Lamermoor.

She later worked in Germany as a weather announcer on TV with MAC, and the United States Armed Forces network. With a stint in El Salvador, she worked as a Spanish translator and freelance journalist covering the war where she met Ollie North.

Having studied, worked and vacationed in many different countries, including Russia, where she had been invited to participate in the Nixon presidential entourage, she speaks fluent Spanish, Italian, and broken Polish and French.

Alinka says she owes an enormous debt of gratitude to her father, Edward Zyrmont, whose valiant fighting, bravery and sacrifice in World War II, enabled her the ability to be a “free spirit.” She has written several romance novels, travelogues, a Spanish-English “Easy Say” booklet for travelers, and a book documenting WWII, As Long As We Still Live, (Kiedy My Zyjemy).

Never one to be afraid of controversy, she fights for what she believes in, and has been involved in several civic activities such as acting vice-president of the Lighthouse Point Homeowners’ Association. She led a fight against copyright infringement on the internet, and was part of a successful class-action lawsuit against some Hollywood producers for not hiring older writers. Together with Action On Smoking And Health (ASH) she lobbied congress for seven years fighting the tobacco lobby to abolish smoking on airplanes. During the bitter Continental Airlines strike, she formed the Pilots’ Wives Association, and testified before the now defunct CAB in Washington, and once again instigated a letter-writing campaign to prevent Frank Lorenzo from obtaining his airworthiness certificate to purchase another airline.

She was the first woman in the State of Florida to file a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church for sexual harassment by a priest, thus opening the door to other lawsuits to rid the church of “bad apples.” And if that was not enough, she was also embroiled against the IRS and won under the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights. “I guess my competitive spirit stems from being a sprinter. I won a silver cup in school for the 100 meter dash. Nobody could beat me at running. My Scottish tenacity, Polish perseverance, and American resourcefulness make me a formidable adversary. I always have to win.”

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