In This City (Exile Classics Nine)

In these eight masterful stories Austin Clarke has caught the sorrowful and sometimes sweet longing for a home in the heart that torments the dislocated in any big city. “Clarke may be one of the two or three most talented black writers in North America…. His work is distinguished by a high elegance, a powerful, unique use of language” —Norman Mailer

Austin Clarke was a professor of literature and taught at Yale, Brandeis, Williams, Duke, and the Universities of Texas and Indiana. He assisted in setting up a Black Studies program at Yale in 1968, after which he became the cultural attaché of the Embassy of Barbados in Washington, D.C. Culminating with the international success of The Polished Hoe, which won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Prize. Austin Clarke’s work since 1964 includes eleven novels, six short-story collections, and four memoirs. He lived in Toronto until his death in June 2016.