Mitchell prize recognizing his body of work.īut Clarke’s biggest moment in the literary limelight came in 2002. The author was also the winner of the 1999 W.O.
In 1998 Clarke was made a member of the Order of Canada. And his 1999 novel “The Question” was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. In 1997, his novel “The Origin of the Waves” won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The next year, he ran unsuccessfully as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the 1977 Ontario provincial election. In 1975, he returned to his homeland to become general manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corp., returning to Canada in 1976.
He kept writing throughout, publishing “Storm of Fortune” in 1973 and “The Bigger Light” in 1975. He also worked as a cultural attache to the Barbadian Embassy in Washington. “The Meeting Point,” released in 1967, focused on the lives of West Indian natives living in Toronto.ĭuring the late 1960s and early ’70s, Clarke became a visiting lecturer at a number of major U.S. His first two novels were set in the West Indies: “The Survivors of Crossing” (1964) and He soon turned to journalism and subsequently to fiction.
James, Barbados, and moved to Canada in 1955 to attend the University of Toronto. “Certainly, there is no other black Canadian author who has been so heartily embraced as Austin Clarke,” wrote literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse in a 2003 profile published by the trade magazine Quill & Quire.Īustin Chesterfield Clarke was born in St. Over the course of his long career Clarke frequently wrote about the immigrant experience and being black in Canada. TORONTO - Austin Clarke, the Toronto-based writer who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his 2002 novel “The Polished Hoe,” has died. Giller Prize winner Austin Clarke hoists a glass as he holds a copy of his book the Polished Hoe after winning the $25,000 literary prize at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto in a November 5, 2002, file photo.
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