The Polished Hoe

Austin Chesterfield Clarke was born in St. James, Barbados on July 26, 1934. He moved to Canada in 1955 to attend the University of Toronto, where he studied economics and political science. He worked as a journalist before becoming an author. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became a visiting lecturer at a number of U.S. universities and was among the professors who founded Yale University's Black Studies program. He also worked as a cultural attache to the Barbadian Embassy in Washington. In 1975, he returned to Barbados to become general manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation and an advisor to the prime minister. He returned to Canada in 1976 and became a Canadian citizen in 1981.

His works mainly focus on the immigrant experience and being black in Canada. His books include The Survivors of Crossing, The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune, The Bigger Light, The Question, and More. In 1997, The Origin of the Waves won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2002, The Polished Hoe won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for best book, and the Trillium Book Award.

His memoir, Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack, won the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literature in 1980. His other memoirs include A Passage Back Home and 'Membering. He also wrote five short-story collections and in 1999, he was awarded the W.O. Mitchell Prize for producing an outstanding body of work for his short stories collections. In 1998, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. He died on June 26, 2016 at the age of 81.

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