The Austin Clarke Reader

Born in Barbados in 1934, Clarke came to Toronto in 1955. He has been in the forefront of West Indian writing and Canadian writing ever since, bringing to bear on all of his dozen books of fiction his erudition, his familiarity with key figures in the civil rights movement, and his active engagement with politics in his adopted hometown, Toronto. In this long overdue reader, from a writer who has been an antennae for the crucial issues in our time, we have a substantial selection from his major stories, an excerpt from his novel, The Prime Minister (still banned in Barbados), his memoirs, his essays and reviews, and a number of key personal letters. General readers and students will understand why the Times Literary Supplement said he was “rich in humour and human sympathy.” Clarke’s work is unique, surprising, comfortable, until the moment when it becomes uncomfortable and then one realizes one has learned something new that one didn’t want to know, and yet it’s essential knowledge. And so on one goes, alternately congratulating and cursing Austin Clarke, but changing the workings of one’s own mind.