An exciting new book that is out this week is ‘Membering (Dundurn 2015) by Barbados-born, Canadian writer Austin Clarke.

Overview: Austin Clarke is a distinguished and celebrated novelist and short-story writer. His works often centre around the immigrant experience, 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 Afro-American writers.

Clarke has been called Canada’s first multicultural writer. Here he eschews a traditional chronological order of events and takes the reader on a lyrical tour of his extraordinary life, interspersed with thought-provoking meditations on politics and race. Telling things as he ’members them.

Austin Clarke is one of Canada’s foremost authors, whose work includes ten novels, six short-story collections, three memoirs, and two collections of poetry. His novel The Polished Hoe won the 2002 Giller Prize. Clarke is a member of the Order of Canada, holds four honorary doctorates, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the W.O. Mitchell Prize, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Excellence in Writing, among others. In his fifty-year career he has worked as a journalist, a professor, and a cultural attaché in Washington D.C. He lives in Toronto.

For more on the book, see https://www.dundurn.com/books/%E2%80%99Membering and http://www.amazon.ca/x2019-Membering-Austin-Clarke/dp/1459730348