Caryl Phillips

Life

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts to Malcolm and Lillian Phillips on 13 March 1958. When he was four months old, his family moved to England and settled in Leeds, Yorkshire. In 1976, Phillips won a place at Queen's College, Oxford University, where he read English, graduating in 1979. While at Oxford, he directed numerous plays and spent his summers working as a stagehand at the Edinburgh Festival. On graduating, he moved to Edinburgh, where he lived for a year, on the dole, while writing his first play, Strange Fruit (1980), which was taken up and produced by the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. Phillips subsequently moved to London, where he wrote two more plays Where There is Darkness (1982) and Shelter (1983) that were staged at the Lyric Hammersmith.

At the age of 22, he visited St. Kitts for the first time since his family had left the island in 1958. The journey provided the inspiration for his first novel, The Final Passage, which was published five years later. After publishing his second book, A State of Independence (1986), Phillips went on a one-month journey around Europe, which resulted in his 1987 collection of essays The European Tribe. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phillips divided his time between England and St. Kitts while working on his novels Higher Ground (1989) and Cambridge (1991). At that time, Phillips was a member of the Black Bristol Writers Group, which helped to foster his creative writing.

In 1990, Phillips took up a Visiting Writer post at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He remained at Amherst College for a further eight years, becoming the youngest English tenured professor in the US when he was promoted to that position in 1995. During this time, he wrote what is perhaps his best-known novel, Crossing the River (1993), which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. After taking up the position at Amherst, Phillips found himself doing "a sort of triangular thing" for a number of years, residing between England, St Kitts, and the U.S.

Finding this way of living both "incredibly exhausting" and "prohibitively expensive", Phillips ultimately decided to give up his residence in St. Kitts, though he says he still makes regular visits to the island. In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order. In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English. He was made an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011.

Phillips supports football team Leeds United and watches "every game".

Works and critical reception

Phillips has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles, and his writing is concerned with issues of "origins, belongings and exclusion", as noted by a reviewer of his 2015 novel The Lost Child. The Atlantic Sound has been compared to the travel writing in Looking for Transwonderland, by Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa.

Phillips received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Dancing in the Dark in 2006.

Activism

Phillips is the patron of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, which works to promote the memory of the death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian man in Leeds who was persecuted to death by the police. On 25 April 2022 Phillips unveiled a Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque commemorating Oluwale's death, which was torn down hours later.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Final Passage (Faber and Faber, 1985, ; Picador, 1995, paperback )
• A State of Independence (Faber and Faber, 1986, ; paperback )
• Higher Ground: A Novel in Three Parts (Viking, 1989, )
• Cambridge (Bloomsbury, 1991; Vintage, 2008, paperback )
• Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993, )
• The Nature of Blood (1997; Vintage, 2008, paperback )
• A Distant Shore (Secker, 2003, hardback ; Vintage, 2004, paperback )
• Dancing in the Dark (Secker, 2005, )
• Foreigners: Three English Lives (Harvill Secker, 2007, )
• In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker, 2009, hardback ; Vintage, 2010, paperback )
• The Lost Child (Oneworld Publications, 2015, hardback, 978-1780747989 paperback)
• A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, hardback, )

Essay collections

• The European Tribe (Faber and Faber, 1987)
• The Atlantic Sound (Faber and Faber, 2000, )
• A New World Order: Selected Essays (Martin Secker & Warburg, 2001, )
• Colour Me English (Harvill Secker, 2011, paperback )

As editor

• Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (Faber and Faber, 1997, )

Plays

• Strange Fruit (Amber Lane Press, 1980, )
• The Shelter (Amber Lane Press, 1984, )
• Playing Away (Faber and Faber, 1987, )
• A Kind of Home – James Baldwin in Paris (BBC Radio 4, 9 January 2004)
• Hotel Cristobel (BBC Radio 3, 13 March 2005)
• A Long Way from Home (BBC Radio 3, 30 March 2008)

Awards

• 1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, The European Tribe
• 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1994 Lannan Literary Award
• 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Crossing the River
• 2000 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Crossing the River
• 2006 Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford
• 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize, A Distant Shore
• 2011 Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
• 2012 Best of the James Tait Black, shortlist, Crossing the River

References

Notes

Sources

References

1. Tempestoso, Carla. (2020-07-16). "Silences that Ride the Air: Soundscaping Slavery in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River". Linguæ & Rivista di lingue e culture moderne.
2. [[Gerard Woodward. Woodward, Gerard]], [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-lost-child-by-caryl-phillips-book-review-wuthering-heights-relived-in-postwar-britain-10135393.html "The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips, book review: Wuthering Heights relived in post-war Britain"], ''The Independent'', 26 March 2015.
3. Hållén, Nickla S.. (2017-01-01). "Travel Writing and the Representation of Concurrent Worlds: Caryl Phillips' The Atlantic Sound and Noo Saro–Wiwa's Looking for Transwonderland". Brill.
4. (2022-04-26). "David Oluwale: Blue bridge plaque theft treated as hate crime". BBC News.
5. (2022-04-26). "Memorial to police racism victim stolen hours after unveiling".
6. Lazar, Zachary. (2025-01-09). "Book Review: 'Another Man in the Street,' by Caryl Phillips".
7. Cummins, Anthony. (2025-01-18). "Caryl Phillips: 'It was Britain that made me a writer'". The Guardian.
8. (2025-01-11). "Caryl Phillips: 'Reading is an act of empathy'".
9. Qureshi, Bilal. (2025-01-07). "'Another Man in the Street' is a novel full of startling insights". Washington Post.
10. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/11_november/27/radio4_quarter1_drama.pdf "A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris"], ''Friday play'', BBC Radio 4.
11. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/fzqtj "Hotel Cristobel"], ''Drama on 3'', BBC Radio 3.
12. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009md7p "A Long Way from Home"], ''Drama on 3'', BBC Radio 3.
13. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/r574n "A Long Way from Home, by Caryl Phillips"], ''Drama on 3'', BBC .
14. Leadbetter, Russell. (21 October 2012). "Book prize names six of the best in search for winner". Herald Scotland.
15. (21 October 2012). "Authors in running for 'best of best' James Tait Black award". BBC News.