Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips
Born	(1958-03-13) 13 March 1958 St. Kitts
Occupation	Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Nationality	Kittitian-British
Notable works	The Final Passage (1985), Crossing the River (1993), Dancing in the Dark (2005)
Notable awards	Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2003, 2006); James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1994)

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.

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, Phillips 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).

In 1990, Phillips took up a Visiting Writer post at Amherst College in 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 most well-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 that 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. Phillips 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.

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. Phillips's work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for A Distant Shore.

Phillips received the PEN Open Book Award (formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award) for Dancing in the Dark in 2006.

Bibliography

Novels

• 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)
• In the Falling Snow (2009)
• The Lost Child (2015)

Historical fiction

• Foreigners (2007)

Essay collections

• The European Tribe (1987)
• The Atlantic Sound (2000)
• A New World Order (2001)
• Colour Me English (2011)

Radio plays

• A Kind of Home – James Baldwin in Paris (9 January 2004)
• Hotel Cristobel (13 March 2005)
• A Long Way from Home (30 March 2008)

Awards

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

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", 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.

External links

• Caryl Phillips' official website
• The Caryl Phillips Bibliography
• Caryl Phillips' Writers Page at the British Council
• Caryl Phillips at Yale University
• The Caryl Phillips Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• "'Lost Child' Author Caryl Phillips: 'I Needed To Know Where I Came From'", NPR interview, 21 March 2015.