” In it, Clarke “wrote about his inability to find a decent job and of being routinely snubbed by waitresses and sales clerks in favour of white customers, ” the same magazine reported 36 years later. That same year, he caused a minor stir with an article he wrote for Maclean ’s, the country ’s leading weekly, titled “A Black Man Talks about Race Prejudice in White Canada.

He found work as a journalist in Timmins and Kirkland Lake, Ontario, then worked as a freelance producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) after 1963. Wrote Controversial ArticleĪrriving in Montreal in 1955, Clarke first attended McGill University, and then relocated to Toronto to study economics and politics at Trinity College. He dreamed of studying in England, and applied to and was accepted at both Oxford University and the London School of Economics his financial circumstances, however, would not permit it, and so he decided to go to Canada instead.

For a time in the early 1950s, Clarke taught school, but realized his opportunities were limited. He then went on to Harrison College, the leading post- secondary school on the island, from which every prime minister of Barbados had graduated. As a youth, he excelled in school and was accepted at Combermere, the top school in Barbados and considered the first step toward a career in the civil service - the best financial opportunity toward which a Barbadian might aspire on the island. Clarke ’s father was an artist, and his mother worked as a hotel laundress. At the time, Barbados was a colonial possession of Britain, with a large population of English who worked there as civil servants or owned large plantations on which Barbadians worked. “For more than three decades, Clarke, in oracular style, has delineated the blend of vigour and resilience that informs the experience of the exiled West Indian, ” declared Globe and Mail writer Donna Nurse.Ĭlarke was born in the town of St. At the same time, he wrote a number of well-received novels that portrayed the life of Caribbean transplants such as himself to the northernmost cities of North America. A native of Barbados, Clarke arrived in Toronto in the 1950s and began a career in journalism soon afterward that included time as managing editor of Contrast, the city ’s flagship black newspaper. Novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Austin Clarke has sometimes been hailed as Canada ’s first multicultural writer.

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