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.
A Passage Back Home
$19.95
Samuel Selvon, says Clarke, was a writer of greatness: he was the first to understand the importance of the tremendous power of “Creole” language, which he employed with marvellous creative singularity, to raise the impact of the language he had inherited, in such a way that his “language” became international. This memoir of Clarke’s times in his company, is the attempt to recapture his outstanding contribution to West Indian literature. But most of all, Selvon was a man who lived for his writing, and his writing will live because of its closeness to the realism of life.