Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke, known as Tom, was born on 26 July 1934 in St. James, Barbados, where he was educated in Anglican schools. He left the island in 1955 to study at the University of Toronto, became involved in the civil rights movement, and began writing. He became a Canadian citizen in 1981.
His first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing (1964), explored the effects of colonialism and slavery in pre-independence Barbados through the story of a canecutter. He then wrote his Toronto trilogy, The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973) and The Bigger Light (1975), which gave the first comprehensive fictional treatment of the complexities of Black West Indian immigrant life in Canada. His first short story collection was When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (1971).
He also took on public roles. He worked as a journalist, was Barbados's Cultural Attaché in Washington in 1973, was acting general manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in 1975, held academic posts in the United States and later worked on Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board. His experiences in Barbados inspired The Prime Minister (1977), a novel about the moral bankruptcy of neo-colonial politics.
Clarke's crowning achievement was The Polished Hoe (2002), the story of Mary-Matilda, an elderly woman on a plantation in Barbados who confesses to a long-ago killing in a single night's narrative to a police officer. It won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. His earlier novel The Origin of Waves won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 1997, and More won the Toronto Book Award in 2009.
He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1998 and later of the Order of Ontario. Over his career he published 11 novels, six short-story collections, four memoirs and two poetry collections. He died in Toronto on 26 June 2016, aged 81. The critic Donna Bailey Nurse wrote that no other Black Canadian author had been so heartily embraced as he was, and the writer Rinaldo Walcott said he had written the community's collective story and returned it as an intellectual gift.
- Giller Prize winner for The Polished Hoe, 2002
- Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, 2003
- Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, 1997
- Author of the Toronto trilogy about Caribbean immigrant life
- Author of 11 novels and many other books
- Tell the story you know. Clarke wrote the lives of the Caribbean immigrants he lived among, and found a worldwide audience.
- Persistence rewards. His greatest success came after four decades of writing.