[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [faqs] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [contact us]
|
The
2007 Award
|
|
George and Rue by George Elliott Clarke
|
Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
|
ABOUT
THE BOOK
|
| IT
WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, a "slug-ugly" crime. Brothers George and
Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver
to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi'kmaq
and part African, were both hanged in Fredericton for the killing. Those facts are also skeletons in George Elliott Clarke's family closet. Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins' deeds, Clarke set out to discover just what kind of forces would reduce men to crime, violence and, ultimately, murder. His findings took shape in the 2001 Governor General's Award-winning Execution Poems and culminates brilliantly in George & Rue. The novel shifts seamlessly back into the killers' pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too shamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders. George & Rue is a book about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humour. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke's writing, here is a literary debut that will be marked by celebration-and controversy. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
|
George Elliot Clarke is an award-winning poet, playwright and screenwriter. He is the author of six books of poetry, including Whylah Falls, a 2002 CBC Canada Reads finalist, and Execution Poems, winner of the 2001 Governor General's Award for Poetry. Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. He now lives in Toronto, where he is currently the E. J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, but also owns land in Nova Scotia. He was recently awarded the Trudeau Fellowship. |
|
|
[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [faqs] [contact us]
Copyright
© 2007 Dublin City Public Libraries
