George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke was born on 12 February 1960 in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near Three Mile Plains, a community settled by Black Loyalists and Black Refugees, to William and Geraldine Clarke. He grew up in Halifax and describes himself as a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi'kmaq heritage. He earned a BA in English from the University of Waterloo in 1984 and an MA from Dalhousie in 1989.

He worked as a social worker in rural Black communities in Nova Scotia, as a newspaper editor and, from 1987 to 1991, as a parliamentary aide in Ottawa to the MP Howard McCurdy. He coined the term Africadian, a blend of African and Acadian, to describe the descendants of Black Loyalists who settled in the Maritimes in the late eighteenth century, and became a driving force in the study and promotion of Black Canadian literature.

His breakthrough was Whylah Falls (1990), a verse novel that gives a multi-voiced portrait of an Africadian community and won the Archibald Lampman Award. It was adapted for radio and the stage. He wrote the libretto of the opera Beatrice Chancy (1999), and his collection Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of George and Rue won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, which he revisited in his 2005 novel George and Rue.

Clarke has published about sixteen poetry collections, two novels and plays, librettos and screenplays, and has taught at the University of Toronto, where he is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature, and at Duke, McGill and Harvard. He was Toronto's fourth Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2015 and from 2016 to 2017 served as Canada's seventh Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

His honours include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award and several honorary doctorates. He was appointed to the Order of Nova Scotia in 2006 and made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2008. He says that he views Africadian literature as literal and liberal, canonising songs and sonnets, histories and homilies.