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 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). He 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.

His 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) and Foreigners (2007). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), and A New World Order (2001). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

He 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 won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.  Phillips is a A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic.

 

Color Me English: Thoughts About Migrations and Belonging Before and After 9/11
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Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: New Press, The (August 9, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1595586504
ISBN-13: 978-1595586506
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches

Named one of the 20 Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2011 by The Huffington Post

Born in St. Kitts and brought up in the UK, bestselling author Caryl Phillips has written about and explored the experience of migration for more than thirty years through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays.

Now, in a magnificent and beautifully written new book, Phillips reflects on the shifting notions of race, culture, and belonging before and after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Color Me English opens with an inspired story from his boyhood, a poignant account of a shared sense of isolation he felt with the first Muslim boy who joined his school. Phillips then turns to his years living and teaching in the United States, including a moving account of the day the twin towers fell. We follow him across Europe and through Africa while he grapples with making sense of colonial histories and contemporary migrations—engaging with legendary African, African American, and international writers from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin who have aspired to see themselves and their own societies more clearly.

A truly transnational reflection on race and culture in a post-9/11 world, Color Me English is a stunning collection of writing that is at once timeless and urgent.

 

The Nature of Blood
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Hardcover: 212 pages
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (April 29, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679454705
ISBN-13: 978-0679454700
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches

A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.

 

Foreigners
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (November 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400079845
ISBN-13: 978-1400079841
Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches

From an acclaimed, award-winning novelist comes this brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact: the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the problem of race in British society.

With his characteristic grace and forceful prose, Phillips describes the lives of three very different men: Francis Barber, “given” to the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose friendship with Johnson led to his wretched demise; Randolph Turpin, a boxing champion who ended his life in debt and decrepitude; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949 and whose death at the hands of police twenty years later was a wake up call for the entire nation. As Phillips weaves together these three stories, he illuminates the complexities of race relations and social constraints with devastating results.

 

In The Falling Snow
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Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307272567
ISBN-13: 978-0307272560
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1 inches

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From one of our most admired fiction writers: the searing story of breakdown and recovery in the life of one man and of a society moving from one idea of itself to another.

Keith—born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother—is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years (whose family “let her go” when she married a black man), kept at arm’s length by his seventeen-year-old son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a co-worker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work—even in fact his life—is no longer relevant.

Moving deftly between past and present, the narrative uncovers the particulars of class, background, temperament, and desire that have brought Keith to this moment, and reveals how, often unwittingly, his wife, his son, and, ultimately, his father help him grasp the breadth of the changes that have occurred around him—and what these changes will require of him.

At once intimate and expansive, deeply moving in its portrayal of the vagaries of familial love and bold in its scrutiny of the personal and societal politics of race, this is Caryl Phillips’s most powerful novel y

A Distant Shore
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by Caryl Phillips

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Knopf (October 14, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400041090
ISBN-13: 978-1400041091
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches et.

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From Caryl Phillips—acclaimed author of The Nature of Blood and The Atlantic Sound—a masterful new novel set in contemporary England, about an African man and an English woman whose hidden lives, and worlds, are revealed in their fragile, fateful connection.

Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She’s recently bought her bungalow; he’s recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can know that it will be the last true human contact either will have.

The novel unfolds into the past to show us how Solomon and Dorothy have arrived at this moment: Solomon, a former soldier, escaping the horrors of a war-ravaged African country, entering England illegally, a non-man with no resources but his own waning strength, and no comprehension of the society that both hates and harbors him; Dorothy, the product of a troubled childhood and a messy divorce, fleeing the repercussions of a desperate obsession. In scene after resonant scene, we watch as Solomon and Dorothy come to live inside themselves, closing off from a world that has changed—and changed them—beyond recognition.

In their powerfully compelling stories, Caryl Phillips has created a brilliant and moving portrait of modern human displacement: from home, from heart, and from self.

Related Links

Offical Website
http://www.carylphillips.com