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Caryl Phillips
Kittian-British writer

Caryl Phillips (born 13 March 1958) is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright and essayist. Best known for his novels (for which he has won multiple awards), Phillips is often described as a Black Atlantic writer, since much of his fictional output is defined by its interest in, and searching exploration of, the experiences of peoples of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean and the United States. As well as writing, Phillips has worked as an academic at numerous institutions including Amherst College, Barnard College, and Yale University, where he has held the position of Professor of English since 2005.

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Life

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts to Malcolm and Lillian Phillips on 13 March 1958.67 When he was four months old, his family moved to England and settled in Leeds, Yorkshire.89 In 1976, Phillips won a place at Queen's College, Oxford University, where he read English, graduating in 1979.1011 While at Oxford, he directed numerous plays and spent his summers working as a stagehand at the Edinburgh Festival.12 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.131415 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.16

At the age of 22, he visited St. Kitts for the first time since his family had left the island in 1958.17 The journey provided the inspiration for his first novel, The Final Passage, which was published five years later.1819 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.20 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).21 At that time, Phillips was a member of the Black Bristol Writers Group, which helped to foster his creative writing.22

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 1995.23 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.24 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.25

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.26 In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order.27 In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English.28 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 2011.29

Phillips supports football team Leeds United and watches "every game".30

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.31 The Atlantic Sound has been compared to the travel writing in Looking for Transwonderland, by Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa.32

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.33 On 25 April 2022 Phillips unveiled a Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque commemorating Oluwale's death, which was torn down hours later.34

Bibliography

Novels

  • The Final Passage (Faber and Faber, 1985, ISBN 978-0571134373; Picador, 1995, paperback ISBN 978-0571134373)
  • A State of Independence (Faber and Faber, 1986, ISBN 978-0571139101; paperback ISBN 978-0571196791)
  • Higher Ground: A Novel in Three Parts (Viking, 1989, ISBN 978-0670826209)
  • Cambridge (Bloomsbury, 1991; Vintage, 2008, paperback ISBN 978-0099520566)
  • Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993, ISBN 978-0747514978)
  • The Nature of Blood (1997; Vintage, 2008, paperback ISBN 978-0099520573)
  • A Distant Shore (Secker, 2003, hardback ISBN 978-0436205644; Vintage, 2004, paperback ISBN 978-0099428886)
  • Dancing in the Dark (Secker, 2005, ISBN 978-0436205835)
  • Foreigners: Three English Lives (Harvill Secker, 2007, ISBN 978-0436205972)
  • In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker, 2009, hardback ISBN 978-1846553066; Vintage, 2010, paperback ISBN 978-0099539742)
  • The Lost Child (Oneworld Publications, 2015, ISBN 978-1780746999 hardback, 978-1780747989 paperback)
  • A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, hardback, ISBN 978-0374283612)
  • Another Man in the Street. 7 January 2025. ISBN 978-0-374-61355-6. 35363738

Essay collections

As editor

  • Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (Faber and Faber, 1997, ISBN 978-0571190867)

Plays

Awards

Notes

Sources

Further reading

  • Charras, Françoise, "De-Centering the Center: George Lamming's Natives of My Person (1972) and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1991)", in Maria Diedrich, Carl Pedersen and Justine Tally (eds), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Form and the Production of Knowledge. Hamburg: LIT, 1999, pp. 61–78.
  • Joannou, Maroula. "'Go West, Old Woman': The Radical Re-Visioning of Slave History in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River", in Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (eds), Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007.
  • Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
  • Muñoz-Valdivieso, Sofia, "'Amazing Grace': The Ghosts of Newton, Equiano and Barber in Caryl Phillips's Fiction"[permanent dead link], Afroeuropa 2, 1 (2008).
  • O'Callaghan, Evelyn. "Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips's Cambridge", Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1993): 34–47.
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References

  1. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  2. Low 1998. - Low, Gail (Winter 1998). "'A Chorus of Common Memory': Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge and Crossing the River". Research in African Literatures. 29 (1): 121–141.

  3. Bewes 2006. - Bewes, Timothy (Spring 2006). "Shame, Ventriloquy and the Problem of Cliche in Caryl Phillips". Cultural Critique. 63: 33–60. doi:10.1353/cul.2006.0014. https://doi.org/10.1353%2Fcul.2006.0014

  4. Sethi 2009. - Sethi, Anita (22 May 2009). "Caryl Phillips: I prefer not to raise my head above the parapet". The Independent. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/caryl-phillips-i-prefer-not-to-raise-my-head-above-the-parapet-1688887.html

  5. Phillips 2005–2010. - Phillips, Caryl (2005–2010). "Biography: Education and Teaching". Caryl Phillips: The Official Website. Retrieved 10 September 2012. http://www.carylphillips.com/education-teaching.html

  6. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  7. Sethi 2009. - Sethi, Anita (22 May 2009). "Caryl Phillips: I prefer not to raise my head above the parapet". The Independent. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/caryl-phillips-i-prefer-not-to-raise-my-head-above-the-parapet-1688887.html

  8. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  9. Metcalfe 2010. - Metcalfe, Anna (21 June 2010). "Small Talk: Caryl Phillips". The Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bcc17536-7a61-11df-9cd7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xdTTH6rU

  10. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  11. British Council. - British Council. "Caryl Phillips". British Council. Archived from the original on 20 August 2012. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120820012148/http://literature.britishcouncil.org/caryl-phillips

  12. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  13. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  14. Phillips 2010. - Phillips, Caryl (17 October 2010). "Once upon a life". The Observer (Observer Magazine). p. 14. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/17/caryl-phillips-edinburgh-once-upon-a-life

  15. Bell 1991, pp. 585–586. - Bell, C. Rosalind (Summer 1991). "Worlds Within: An Interview with Caryl Phillips". Callaloo. 14 (3): 578–606. doi:10.2307/2931461. JSTOR 2931461. https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2931461

  16. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  17. Eckstein 2001. - Eckstein, Lars (April 2001). "The Insistence of Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips". Ariel. 32 (2): 33–43. Archived from the original on 15 January 2013. https://archive.today/20130115161349/http://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/3555/3496

  18. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  19. Swift 1992. - Swift, Graham (Winter 1992). "Caryl Phillips (An Interview)". BOMB. 38. Archived from the original on 26 May 2012. Retrieved 13 June 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120526071715/http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1511

  20. Bell 1991, pp. 558–559. - Bell, C. Rosalind (Summer 1991). "Worlds Within: An Interview with Caryl Phillips". Callaloo. 14 (3): 578–606. doi:10.2307/2931461. JSTOR 2931461. https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2931461

  21. Phillips 1995, p. 156. - Phillips, Caryl; Sharpe, Jenny (1995). "Of this Time, of that Place". Transition. 68 (68): 154–161. doi:10.2307/2935298. JSTOR 2935298. https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2935298

  22. Tempestoso, Carla (16 July 2020). "Silences that Ride the Air: Soundscaping Slavery in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River". Linguæ & - Rivista di lingue e culture moderne. 19 (1): 119–131. doi:10.7358/ling-2020-001-temp. ISSN 1724-8698. https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/linguae/article/view/1914

  23. Jaggi 2001. - Jaggi, Maya (3 November 2001). "Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities

  24. Booker Prize Foundation. - Booker Prize Foundation. "Caryl Phillips". Booker Prize Foundation. Archived from the original on 27 October 2012. Retrieved 13 June 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20121027193951/http://themanbookerprize.com/people/caryl-phillips

  25. Phillips 1995. - Phillips, Caryl; Sharpe, Jenny (1995). "Of this Time, of that Place". Transition. 68 (68): 154–161. doi:10.2307/2935298. JSTOR 2935298. https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2935298

  26. Phillips 1995. - Phillips, Caryl; Sharpe, Jenny (1995). "Of this Time, of that Place". Transition. 68 (68): 154–161. doi:10.2307/2935298. JSTOR 2935298. https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2935298

  27. British Council. - British Council. "Caryl Phillips". British Council. Archived from the original on 20 August 2012. Retrieved 12 June 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120820012148/http://literature.britishcouncil.org/caryl-phillips

  28. Phillips 2005–2010. - Phillips, Caryl (2005–2010). "Biography: Education and Teaching". Caryl Phillips: The Official Website. Retrieved 10 September 2012. http://www.carylphillips.com/education-teaching.html

  29. Phillips 2005–2010b. - Phillips, Caryl (2005–2010b). "Biography:Awards". Caryl Phillips. Retrieved 10 September 2012. http://www.carylphillips.com/awards.html

  30. Guardian 2025. sfn error: no target: CITEREFGuardian2025 (help)

  31. Woodward, Gerard, "The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips, book review: Wuthering Heights relived in post-war Britain", The Independent, 26 March 2015. /wiki/Gerard_Woodward

  32. Hållén, Nickla S. (1 January 2017). Travel Writing and the Representation of Concurrent Worlds: Caryl Phillips' The Atlantic Sound and Noo Saro–Wiwa's Looking for Transwonderland. Brill. pp. 59–76. doi:10.1163/9789004347601_004. ISBN 978-90-04-34760-1. 978-90-04-34760-1

  33. "David Oluwale: Blue bridge plaque theft treated as hate crime". BBC News. 26 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-61227944

  34. "Memorial to police racism victim stolen hours after unveiling". ITV News. 26 April 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022. https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2022-04-26/memorial-to-police-racism-victim-stolen-hours-after-unveiling

  35. Lazar, Zachary (9 January 2025). "Book Review: 'Another Man in the Street,' by Caryl Phillips". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 February 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/books/review/another-man-in-the-street-caryl-phillips.html

  36. Cummins, Anthony (18 January 2025). "Caryl Phillips: 'It was Britain that made me a writer'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 26 February 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/18/caryl-phillips-novel-another-man-in-the-street-interview

  37. "Caryl Phillips: 'Reading is an act of empathy'". Financial Times. 11 January 2025. Retrieved 26 February 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/1ce71c6d-f4b8-446c-a1f8-7d95888bc910

  38. Qureshi, Bilal (7 January 2025). "'Another Man in the Street' is a novel full of startling insights". Washington Post. Retrieved 26 February 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/07/another-man-in-the-street-caryl-phillips-review/

  39. "A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris", Friday play, BBC Radio 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/11_november/27/radio4_quarter1_drama.pdf

  40. "Hotel Cristobel", Drama on 3, BBC Radio 3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/fzqtj

  41. "A Long Way from Home", Drama on 3, BBC Radio 3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009md7p

  42. "A Long Way from Home, by Caryl Phillips", Drama on 3, BBC . https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/r574n

  43. Leadbetter, Russell (21 October 2012). "Book prize names six of the best in search for winner". Herald Scotland. Retrieved 21 October 2012. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/book-prize-names-six-of-the-best-in-search-for-winner.19197747

  44. "Authors in running for 'best of best' James Tait Black award". BBC News. 21 October 2012. Retrieved 21 October 2012. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20020630