The Polished Hoe
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The Polished Hoe
''The Polished Hoe'' is a novel by Barbadian writer Austin Clarke, published by Thomas Allen Publishers in 2002. It was the winner of the 2002 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean region and 2003 Trillium Book Award. Plot The novel is a narrative by Mary-Mathilda (Miss Mary Gertrude Matilda Paul) of her confession of a crime. The events takes place in about twenty-four hours of span starting on a night in the 1950s post World War II era. She is a respected woman of the island of Barbados, popularly called "Bimshire." She goes to the police and encounters her old friend Percy, a police sergeant with whom she shares unrequited feelings. Mary-Mathilda confesses to murdering Mr. Belfeels, the owner of a sugar plantation, a rich man known for his arrogance towards the workers under him. Mary-Mathilda had been working as a field labourer, kitchen help and then as a maid and for many years has also been Belfeels' mistress. She ...
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Austin Clarke (novelist)
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield "Tom" Clarke, (July 26, 1934 – June 26, 2016), was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and short story writer who was based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Among his notable books are novels such as '' The Polished Hoe'' (2002), memoirs including ''Membering'' (2015), and two collections of poetry, ''Where the Sun Shines Best'' (2013) and ''In Your Crib'' (2015). Early life and education Austin Clarke was born in 1934 in St. James, Barbados Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the Caribbean region of the Americas, and the most easterly of the Caribbean Islands. It occupies an area of and has a population of about 287,000 (2019 estimate). ..., where he received his early education in Anglican schools. He taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada and attended the University of Toronto's Trinity College, Toronto, Trinity College for two years.Murray Whyte"Acclaimed Toronto author Aust ...
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Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy, CM (born 25 June 1950) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto. Literary career Gowdy's novel '' Falling Angels'' (1989) was made into a film of the same name by director Scott Smith, from an adaptation written by Esta Spalding, in 2002. The comically dark novel focuses on a nuclear family in a 1960s Ontario suburb. The main characters are three sisters who come of age in a house run by their abusive and womanizing father and must constantly find ways to take care of their depressed and alcoholic mother. Gowdy says her inspiration for the book was the idea of a Canadian family living during the Cold War and practicing using their bomb shelter in the back yard. In the novel and movie, the family spend two weeks trapped in the bomb shelter as an "exercise" rather than going on a family trip to Disneyland. Authors such as Alice Munro and Carol Shield ...
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Books About Barbados
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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Novels By Austin Clarke (novelist)
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historic ...
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Jeffrey Brown (journalist)
Jeffrey Brown (born 1956) is an American journalist, who is a senior correspondent for the ''PBS NewsHour''. His reports focus on arts and literature, and he has interviewed numerous writers, poets, and musicians. Brown has worked most of his professional career at PBS and has written a poetry collection called ''The News''. Early life and education Brown was born in 1956 to Morton Brown and Mirriam "Micki" Brown (née Decter). He has four siblings, and grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts. He graduated from high school in 1974. Brown studied Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a bachelor's degree. He planned to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD subsequently in order to become an academic, but finally decided he wanted to be a law journalist. Brown did a joint program at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Law and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School. He first studied law for two years and then studied journalis ...
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Naeem Murr
Naeem Murr (born March 1965) is a British-born novelist and short story writer of Lebanese descent. He is the author of three novels acclaimed for their dark portraiture and stark, original prose. He currently lives in Chicago with his wife, poet Averill Curd Biography Born in London, Murr moved to the United States in his early twenties and has been a writer-in-residence at numerous universities, including Western Michigan University, the University of Missouri, and Northwestern University and was a Stanford University Creative Writing Fellow. His first novel, ''The Boy'', concerns a father's search for a strange orphan he adopted into his family who has fled to live in a slum as a prostitute. It was a New York Times Notable Book. A second novel, ''The Genius of the Sea'', explores the fears and failures of a social-worker coming to terms with his life by talking with a man who now occupies his dead mother's apartment. His most recent book ''The Perfect Man'' was published in 20 ...
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Maya Jaggi
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic , editor and cultural journalist.Maya Jaggi profile
''The Guardian''.
In the words of the , from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today"."Cultural journalist Maya Jaggi receives OU Honorary Doctorate"
The Open University, 3 April 2012.
Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including ''

Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ...
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Carol Shields
Carol Ann Shields, (née Warner; June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel '' The Stone Diaries'', which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada. Early life and education Shields was born Carol Ann Warner in Oak Park, Illinois. She studied at Hanover College, in Indiana, where she became a member of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority. A United Nations scholarship encouraged Shields to spend a junior year abroad 1955–1956 at the University of Exeter in England. Shields did post-graduate work at the University of Ottawa, where she received an MA in 1975. In 1955, while on British Council sponsored study week in Scotland, she met a Canadian engineering student, Donald Hugh Shields. The couple married in 1957 and moved to Canada, where they had a son and four daughters. Shields later became a Canadian citizen. Career In 1973, Shields became edi ...
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Unless
''Unless'' is the final novel by Canadian writer Carol Shields, first published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins in 2002. Semi-autobiographical, it was the capstone to Shields's writing career: she died shortly after its publication in 2003. The work was widely acclaimed and nominated for the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In 2011, it was a finalist in the Canada Reads competition, where it was defended by actor Lorne Cardinal. Like many of her works (especially The Stone Diaries), ''Unless'' explores the extraordinary that lies within the ordinary lives of ordinary women. The novel is narrated in first person by 44-year-old writer and translator, Reta Winters. The book proceeds as a linear series of reflections by Reta, elliptically coming to the thematic center of the story: the seemingly arbitrary decision of Reta's college-aged daughter Norah to drop out o ...
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Lisa Moore (writer)
Lisa Moore (born 28 March 1964) is a Canadian writer and editor established in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Biography Born in St. John's, Newfoundland, Moore studied art first at College of the North Atlantic in her home province and then at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Although she had intended to follow a career in the visual arts, she now writes full-time. Moore's work primarily takes place in Newfoundland. She has worked to promote different writers and places of the province by compiling local artists' text and writing articles about Newfoundland communities. In her new book "The Democracy Cookbook" Moore writes a non- partisan approach to "stir up conversations around cabinet tables". Moore's daughter Eva Crocker is also a writer, whose debut short story collection ''Barrelling Forward'' was published in 2017. Awards and recognition Moore's first two books, ''Degrees of Nakedness'' (1995) and ''Open'' (2002), are short story collections. '' ...
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