Austin Clarke

Austin Chesterfield Clarke was born in Barbados in 1934 and emigrated to Canada to attend University of Toronto in 1955. He is the winner of the 1999 W.O. Mitchell Prize, awarded each year to a Canadian writer who has produced an outstanding body of work and served as a caring mentor for other writers. Since 1964 Austin Clarke has published nine novels and five short-story collections in the United States, England and Canada, including The Polished Hoe, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Prize for best book, and his most recent, Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke (Thomas Allen, spring 2003). During the 1960s and 70s, Clarke became a leader of the civil rights movement in Toronto, and produced a series of documentaries and interviews with artists and leaders of the civil rights movement.  Between 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, and has served as cultural attaché of the Barbardian Embassy in Washington, general manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados, advisor to the Prime Minister of Barbados. From 1989-94 he was a member of the controversial Immigration and Refugee Board, among many other boards on which he has served.

''The Polished Hoe is a wide-ranging epic in which the experience of several generations of women is masterfully realised...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...'' From the Commonwealth Writers Prize Judges' Citation.

www.tindalstreet.org.uk

Amit's writing has been, and is being, translated into several languages. He is the editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which is also to be published in the US by Vintage in September 2004. His book of short stories, Real Time, was published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in Britain and India by Picador, while his collection of essays, In Parenthesis: Essays on Literature and Culture, is due later. His dissertation on DH Lawrence, DH Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, appeared to critical acclaim from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in June 2003, with an introduction by the renowned Irish poet-critic, Tom Paulin..

Amit has given lectures and readings at various universities and institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, Penn State University, and Emory University.

''One of the most dazzling new talents of any nationality. We come away from his work awed by the brilliance of this language and haunted by his piercing depiction of contemporary India'' - San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth21