Caryl Phillips

Award-winning Novelist & Playwright
PEN/Open Book Award

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  • An Evening with Caryl Phillips

Biography

“Throughout Phillips’s fiction and nonfiction, he focuses on people who are caught in between places, desires, and circumstances of history.” —World Literature Review

“One of the literary giants of our time.” —The New York Times

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He is the author of many novels, plays, screenplays, and works of nonfiction and his work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

Phillips began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). Phillips has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.

Phillips novels include: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), Foreigners (2007), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). In addition to his fiction, he is the author of the nonfiction titles: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011). Phillips is also the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999).

Phillips was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Open Book Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.

He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. From 2002-2003 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Phillips is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, Phillips is presently Professor of English at Yale University and an Honorary Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford University.

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