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Finished books available
US: Amistad Press, Fall 2009
Canada: Thomas Allen, Fall 2008
Australia: Harper Collins, Feb 2009
UK: Tindal Street Press
(Photo: Peter Middleton)
[Downloadable PDFs are available: (1) About Austin Chesterfield Clarke; (2) About the work of Austin Clarke; (3) Austin Clarke's publications]
Culminating with the international success of The Polished Hoe in 2002, Austin Clarke has published ten novels, six short-story collections, and three memoirs in the United States, England, Canada, Australia, and Holland since 1964. Storm of Fortune, the second novel in his Toronto Trilogy about the lives of Barbadian immigrants, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 1973. The Origin of Waves won the Rogers Communications Writers’ Development Trust Prize for Fiction in 1997. In 1999 his ninth novel, The Question, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. In 2003 he had a private audience with Queen Elizabeth in honour of his Commonwealth Prize for his tenth novel, The Polished Hoe, which in 2004 was also a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award.
In 1992 Austin Clarke was honored with a Toronto Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. In 1997, Frontier College in Toronto also granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998 he was invested with the Order of Canada, and since then he has received four honorary doctorates. In 1999 he received the Martin Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in Writing.
Austin Chesterfield Clarke was born in Barbados in 1934 and immigrated to Canada to attend the University of Toronto in 1955. He quickly became a leader of the civil rights movement in Toronto. In his work from 1965-73 as a journalist and broadcaster covering social issues, he produced documentaries and interviews with artists and leaders of the civil rights movement. From 1968-74 Clarke served as visiting professor at Yale, Brandeis, Williams, Wellesley, Duke, and the universities of Texas and Indiana. He assisted in setting up Black Studies programs at Yale and Harvard. In 1974 Clarke became cultural attaché of the Barbadian Embassy in Washington, and from 1975-77 he served as general manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados. From 1973-6 he served as advisor to the Prime Minister of Barbados and from 1989-94 he was a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board. Austin Clarke has been Writer-in-Residence at Massey College, University of Toronto, and at the Toronto Public Library. More is his eleventh novel.
a novel by Austin Clarke
THE MUCH ANTICIPATED NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE, THE COMMONWEALTH PRIZE, AND THE TRILLIUM PRIZE
- The Globe and Mail on Austin Clarke's favourite room
- Toronto's Live with Culture magazine interviews Austin Clarke
- Winner of the 2009 Toronto Book Award
At the news of her son BJ’s involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting exposé of her life as a black immigrant from the Caribbean. While she struggled to make ends meet for 25 years, her deadbeat husband Bertram abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and tries to understand how her life has spiraled into this tragic place. Eventually Idora finds her way back into the light with a courage that is both remarkable and unforgettable.
The most contemporary and perhaps the most political of all of Austin Clarke’s novels, More is a powerful indictment of the iniquities of racial discrimination and the crime of poverty today. It is in many ways a companion volume to the award-winning The Polished Hoe. While that novel told the history of the African Diaspora metaphorically through the life of one woman, More is an allegory about the complexities of race in modern Western culture as experienced by another woman. It is an extraordinary story of oppression, redemption, and hope. From a master of the novel form, this is very much a book for our times.
PRAISE FOR MORE
“...[Clarke] can be expected to bring the reader into the mind of the protagonist, and he doesn’t disappoint with his new novel... affecting novel will shatter American misconceptions about Canadian race relations. A good option for serious readers.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL
“More offers an eloquent and poignant chronicle of Idora Morrison's journey from being a relatively untested girl-woman in a tiny place in tiny Barbados to being a knowing and tested woman in the worldly place of Toronto. Mr. Clarke does not peer into Idora's life, he takes her hand and walks with her every step of the way. And his skill and sensitivity present his readers with a portrait of a soul worth knowing and worth applauding.” — EDWARD P. JONES, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World
“A beautifully written exploration of cultural conflicts and one woman’s struggle to find a place for herself emotionally.” — BOOKLIST
“Clarke brings into the light the dignity and strength with which our mothers and grandmothers have borne their daily exclusions from the more genteel spaces of Canadian identity. By choosing to write Idora's story as Toronto's story, at the height of his literary power, Clarke boldly challenges, and transforms, Canadian sense and sensibility.” — THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“More may stand as one of the crowning achievements of Clarke’s career.” — QUILL & QUIRE
Awards and praise for Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
- National bestseller
- Winner of the 2002 Giller Prize
- Winner of the 2003 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book
- Co-winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award
- Finalist for the 2004 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award
"An extraordinary tale of lust and oppression...a beautiful light-skinned "black" woman [is] forced by the ambition of her mother and the sexual appetite of her colonial master to live a dangerous double life as beneficiary and plaything of a society steeped in racial cruelty." — THE TIMES, UK
"Respect to Tindal Street Press for bringing to the UK this soaring and sorrowful novel of Caribbean life.... Austin Clarke creates a seething panorama of sex, race and power.... The novel's language proves as lush, seductive - and dangerous - as its landscape." — THE INDEPENDENT, UK
"The Polished Hoe's meandering orality, its slow-burning power, succeed movingly in asserting memory over the silent gaps in recorded history." — THE GUARDIAN, UK
"The sensuality of Clarke's writing keeps his story alive. With vibrant characters and language, this is also one of those rare books you can smell." — THE SYDNEY HERALD
"Out of a single act of retribution, Clarke has in fact spun an entire history, one in which freedom, love, and even languor all have their place." — THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"With an obvious affection for Caribbean cadence and its rum-soaked asides, Clarke unfolds Mary's story through the meandering statement she gives to the police after she has taken gruesome revenge on her 'master'." — THE NEW YORKER
"The beauty of [The Polished Hoe] lies in the poetry of its telling and the marvelous voice of Mary-Mathilda. The value of the novel lies in its patient exploration of the sacrifices that are made for the sake of survival." — THE WASHINGTON POST
"Clarke's waltzing speech rhythms and sly humor, reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul, camouflage the rising tension and the final shock, all of it contributing to a Wagnerian crescendo." — THE BOSTON GLOBE
The Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003 for Best Book
"Beautifully drawn, elegantly rendered, a tour-de-force, The Polished Hoe is a wide-ranging epic in which the experience of several generations of women is masterfully realized. Beginning in a chilling statement made to a policeman after a murder, a woman's voice, speaking in the shadowy reaches of a plantation house in the 1950s slowly uncovers layers of disturbing history. But Mary-Mathilda is more than protagonist, she is a haunting that leaps outside the pages of the novel and indicts empires of colonialism and masculinity; she is the unsettled presence, the un-beheld, the un-held, the fetishised, un-loved. In her singular and final act of self-narration her mind is dangerous, her hand ultimately and inexorably nightmarish. The Polished Hoe is a richly crafted novel which eludes, defies categories; it is variously wistful and agonizing, ironic and sensual; a tragic tale, relentlessly wrought." - Commonwealth Prize Judging Panel Chair, Dionne Brand
The 2003 Trillium Book Award
Austin Clarke has transcended the earlier achievements of his already illustrious career with The Polished Hoe by composing a Faulknerian evocation of the Caribbean voice, recounting a somnolent, nocturnal dialogue between a black murderess and a black constable, both of whom confront the racist horror of their own past as they divulge the secrets of both their love and their loss. - Christian Bök, Jan Geddes and Lesley Kruger, jurors for the Trillium Book Award
The 2002 Giller Prize
"Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe is a symphony of Caribbean life and history that arranges the jangle of race and class, rage and passion into an eloquent composition, part slave narrative, part love ballad, part Shakespearean opera, sung against the backdrop of one woman's life. A master of narrative strategies and orchestrations, Clarke creates in Mary Mathilda an evocative and elegant voice that turns the written word into oral performance and fills our imaginations with the smells and sounds and silences of a world seldom seen and little understood." - Giller Prize Jury Comments