’Membering

Austin Clarke is one of Canada's most distinguished and celebrated novelists and short-story writers. His works often centre around the immigrant experience in Canada, of which he writes with humour and compassion, happiness and sorrow.

In 'Membering, Clarke shares his own experiences growing up in Barbados and moving to Toronto to attend university in 1955 before becoming a journalist. With vivid realism he describes Harlem of the '60s, meeting and interviewing Malcolm X, and writers Chinua Achebe and LeRoi Jones. Clarke went on to become a pioneering instructor of Afro-American Literature at Yale University and inspired a new generation of African-American writers.

With a writing career that spans more than fifty years, Clarke has been called "Canada's first multicultural writer" and has been awarded the Giller Prize (The Polished Hoe), the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and the Martin Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in Writing.