’Membering
Narrator Nigel Shawn Williams seemingly reanimates the late Barbadian poet Austin Clarke…Williams’s Caribbean-inflected speech and deliberate pacing fully deliver Clarke’s delight in language as this memoir unfolds…Both Clarke and Williams are supremely fine storytellers, making this audiobook experience rich in both the ears and the mind’s eye…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”“
AudioFile
Longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
Longlisted for the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
The unforgettable memoir of Giller Prize–winning author and poet Austin Clarke, called “Canada’s first multicultural writer.”
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.
Praise