Canada lost a great man in Austin Clarke. He had many fans, but there were also many who didn't know about him.

Quill & Quire has a in-depth feature on Austin's life. Here is a quick look.

“Austin Clarke broke the mould of white Canada when he first began to publish in 1964, writing novels and stories populated with immigrant characters from the Caribbean,” says Patrick Crean, Clarke’s former publisher and editor at Thomas Allen & Son. “This was an early example of the literature of diversity and displacement, a quality which now informs our literature. His influence was huge.”

When I think of Austin Clarke,” writes cultural critic Donna Bailey Nurse, “I think of how his fiction irrevocably etched West Indians, Bajans, black people, and himself into the landscape of Toronto and the collective imagination of Canadians. I think of the courage with which he exposed to white people the psychological realities of being black in the world.”

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