Austin Clarke: Sometimes, A Motherless Child

Works by Austin Clarke

In This City

They Never Told Me and Other Stories

The Polished Hoe

 

Other Related Books or Materials

Odetta’s 1960 recording of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (link opens a Youtube video)

Austin Clarke’s Harlem (link opens part of a CBC audio documentary produced by Austin Clarke in 1963 about the Civil Rights Movement)

Why Literary Critics Failed to Define and Understand Austin Clarke (link opens a National Post article from 2016)

Austin Clarke Quotes (link opens a Twitter account devoted to the quotes and other aspects of Clarke’s work)

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About the Host

Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.

Music is by Yuka

 

From the Archives

Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.