From the author of the Giller Award - winning novel The Polished Hoe comes a new collection of 20 of his best short stories. Choosing His Coffin is a selection of Austin Clarke’s finest work from more than 40 years of storytelling, drawing on his Caribbean roots and his years in Canada. These stories range in theme from growing up in West Indian society and what it means to be black in both the United States and Canada to surviving as an immigrant in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture. Clarke has become one of the most respected authors in North America and is one of Canada’s national literary treasures. He is a master of fictional invention.

Culminating with the international success of The Polished Hoe in 2002, Austin Clarke has published ten novels, six short story collections, and three memoirs in the United States, England, Canada, Australia, and Holland. Storm of Fortune, the second novel in his Toronto Trilogy about the lives of Barbadian immigrants, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 1973. The Origin of Waves won the Rogers Communications Writers’ Development Trust Prize for Fiction in 1997. In 1999, his ninth novel,The Question, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. In 2003 he had a private audience with Queen Elisabeth in honour of his Commonwealth Prize for his tenth novel, The Polished Hoe. In 1992 Austin Clarke was honored with a Toronto Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and in 1997, Frontier College granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998 he was invested with the Order of Canada, and he has received four honorary doctorates. In 1999 he received the Martin Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in Writing.

Austin Clarke's profile page

[Clarke's] rich, twisted humour grows like a fungus out of the blackened core of human nature, making us smile even as its poison creeps in our blood.

The Hamilton Spectator

Twenty of the finest short stories from Clarke's more than 40 years of storytelling.

The Star Phoenix

What makes Choosing His Coffin a wise choice for the discerning reader is a combination of Clarke's masterful storytelling skills, his social awareness, his flowing use of dialogue and his memorable characters, all of whom are drawn with heart and wit.

The Brantford Expositor

All of Clarke's talent comes together: the understated compassion, the sly humour, the seductive language, and the adroit diversions.

Globe and Mail

In the quality of the prose, the depth of the humanity, the acuteness of sexual awareness, the importance of the political issues they address and in their social range, Austin Clarke's collected works simply outstrip the oeuvres of the late Timothy Findley or Robertson Davies by a country mile.

Globe and Mail

A novelist of exceptional gifts.

New York Times

It is hard to fault Clarke...good novels like his are rare.

Saturday Night

...amongst the wide range of his talents — his alternately explosive and razor-sharp facility for dialogue, the joyful musicality of his prose, his deadly sense of satire, his raucous and startling plots, his hilarious characters and caricatures — at the centre of it all is his remarkable feeling for place. He is one of only a handful of writers who captures with perfect mournfulness the hollow grittiness of Toronto's downtown streets.

Quill & Quire