CLARKE AT HOME, 2015 His first book of poetry concerned a racially motivated murder in his downtown Toronto neighbourhood
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED ANDERSON
Austin Clarke never considered himself part of the CanLit firmament. Despite his many achievements – which include winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Book Award for his 2002 novel The Polished Hoe; being longlisted for the Giller and winning the Toronto Book Award for his 2008 novel More; and being invested into the Order of Canada in 1998 – he refused to acknowledge the influence or importance of a Canadian tradition on his writing or outlook. In his 2015 memoir, ’Membering, Clarke wrote, “I have never held a Canadian writer as a model of my own work. This is simply because the theme and the style of Canadian literature are irrelevant to my work. I do not therefore see any connection, in the sense of ‘literary ancestry,’ to my writing. I am alone, singular, peculiar, and foreign to the establishment that governs and controls Canadian literature.”
Clarke had reason to feel this way. McClelland & Stewart published his first novel, Survivors of the Crossing, in 1964; it stands as the first blast of the trumpet from an author who resolutely rejected the accepted pieties of Canadian writing and projected his own individual vision and voice – a voice steeped in Caribbean rhythms and dialects – onto his writing.