Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips

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Caryl Phillips was born on 13 March 1958 on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. He grew up in Leeds, England, and read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He is the author of six novels, several books of non-fiction and has written for film, theatre, radio and television. Much of his writing - both fiction and non-fiction - has focused on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the African Diaspora. The Final Passage (1985), his first novel, won the Malcolm X Prize for Literature. It tells the story of a young woman who leaves her home in the Caribbean to start a new life with her husband and baby in 1950s London. His second novel, A State of Independence (1986), is set in the Caribbean and explores the islands' growing dependency on America. Higher Ground (1989) consists of three narratives linking the lives of a West African slave, a member of the Black Panther movement and a Polish immigrant living in post-war Britain. Cambridge (1991), his fourth novel, is set in the first half of the nineteenth century and centres on the experiences of a young Englishwoman visiting her father's plantation in the Caribbean. The book won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Crossing the River (1993) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Phillips' non-fiction includes a travel narrative, The European Tribe (1987), winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of a journey he made to three vital hubs of the Atlantic slave trade: Liverpool in England, Elmina on the west coast of Ghana, and Charleston in the American South. A New World Order: Selected Essays was published in 2001, and A Distant Shore in 2003, the latter being an exploration of isolation and consolation in an English village. He is also the editor of Extravagant Strangers (1997), a collection of writings by British writers born outside Britain, including work by Ignatius Sancho, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Selvon and Salman Rushdie, and he wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mystic Masseur, first screened in 2001. His work also includes stage and radio drama, most recently the play Rough Crossings (2007). He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and a Lannan Literary Award in 1994. He has taught at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the United States, where he was Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts (1994-8). Since 1998 he has been Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.

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