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Caryl Phillips

{{Short description|Kittitian-British novelist (b. 1958)}}

{{Use British English|date=August 2011}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2020}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Caryl Phillips

| image = Caryl "Caz" Phillips.jpg

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| birth_date = {{birth date and age|df=yes|1958|03|13}}

| birth_place = Saint Kitts

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| occupation = Novelist, playwright, essayist

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| nationality = Kittitian-British

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| alma_mater = Queen's College, Oxford University

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| notableworks = The Final Passage (1985), Crossing the River (1993), Dancing in the Dark (2005)

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| awards = James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1994)
Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2003, 2006)

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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.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|Low|1998}}{{sfn|Bewes|2006}} 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.{{sfn|Sethi|2009}}{{sfn|Phillips|2005–2010}}

Life

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts to Malcolm and Lillian Phillips on 13 March 1958.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|Sethi|2009}} When he was four months old, his family moved to England and settled in Leeds, Yorkshire.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|Metcalfe|2010}} In 1976, Phillips won a place at Queen's College, Oxford University, where he read English, graduating in 1979.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|British Council}} While at Oxford, he directed numerous plays and spent his summers working as a stagehand at the Edinburgh Festival.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}} 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.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|Phillips|2010}}{{sfn|Bell|1991|pages=585–586}} Phillips subsequently moved to London, where he wrote two more plays{{snd}} Where There is Darkness (1982) and Shelter (1983){{snd}} that were staged at the Lyric Hammersmith.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}

At the age of 22, he visited St. Kitts for the first time since his family had left the island in 1958.{{sfn|Eckstein|2001}} The journey provided the inspiration for his first novel, The Final Passage, which was published five years later.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}}{{sfn|Swift|1992}} 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.{{sfn|Bell|1991|pages=558–559}} 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).{{sfn|Phillips|1995|page=156}} At that time, Phillips was a member of the Black Bristol Writers Group, which helped to foster his creative writing.{{Cite journal |last=Tempestoso |first=Carla |date=2020-07-16 |title=Silences that Ride the Air: Soundscaping Slavery in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River |url=https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/linguae/article/view/1914 |journal=Linguæ & - Rivista di lingue e culture moderne |language=en |volume=19 |issue=1 |pages=119–131 |doi=10.7358/ling-2020-001-temp |issn=1724-8698|doi-access=free }}

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.{{sfn|Jaggi|2001}} 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.{{sfn|Booker Prize Foundation}} 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.{{sfn|Phillips|1995}}

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.{{sfn|Phillips|1995}} In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order.{{sfn|British Council}} In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English.{{sfn|Phillips|2005–2010}} 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.{{sfn|Phillips|2005–2010b}}

Phillips supports football team Leeds United and watches "every game".{{sfn|Guardian|2025}}

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.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. The Atlantic Sound has been compared to the travel writing in Looking for Transwonderland, by Nigerian writer Noo Saro-Wiwa.{{Cite book |last=Hållén |first=Nickla S. |url=https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004347601/B9789004347601-s004.xml |title=Travel Writing and the Representation of Concurrent Worlds: Caryl Phillips' The Atlantic Sound and Noo Saro–Wiwa's Looking for Transwonderland |date=2017-01-01 |pages=59–76 |publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-04-34760-1 |language=en |doi=10.1163/9789004347601_004}}

Phillips received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Dancing in the Dark in 2006.{{Citation needed|date=April 2022}}

Activism

File:Caryl Philips unveiling a Leeds Civic Trust Blue Plaque to David Oluwale.webm, 25 April 2022]]

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.{{Cite news |date=2022-04-26 |title=David Oluwale: Blue bridge plaque theft treated as hate crime |language=en-GB |work=BBC News |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-61227944 |access-date=2022-04-29}} On 25 April 2022 Phillips unveiled a Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque commemorating Oluwale's death, which was torn down hours later.{{Cite web |date=2022-04-26 |title=Memorial to police racism victim stolen hours after unveiling |url=https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2022-04-26/memorial-to-police-racism-victim-stolen-hours-after-unveiling |access-date=2022-04-29 |website=ITV News |language=en}}

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}})
  • {{cite book |title=Another Man in the Street |date=2025-01-07 |isbn=978-0-374-61355-6}} {{cite web |last=Lazar |first=Zachary |date=2025-01-09 |title=Book Review: 'Another Man in the Street,' by Caryl Phillips |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/books/review/another-man-in-the-street-caryl-phillips.html |access-date=2025-02-26 |website=The New York Times}}{{Cite news |last=Cummins |first=Anthony |date=2025-01-18 |title=Caryl Phillips: 'It was Britain that made me a writer' |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/18/caryl-phillips-novel-another-man-in-the-street-interview |access-date=2025-02-26 |work=The Guardian |language=en-GB |issn=0261-3077}}{{cite web |date=2025-01-11 |title=Caryl Phillips: 'Reading is an act of empathy' |url=https://www.ft.com/content/1ce71c6d-f4b8-446c-a1f8-7d95888bc910 |access-date=2025-02-26 |website=Financial Times}}{{cite news |last=Qureshi |first=Bilal |date=2025-01-07 |title='Another Man in the Street' is a novel full of startling insights |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/07/another-man-in-the-street-caryl-phillips-review/ |access-date=2025-02-26 |newspaper=Washington Post}}

=Essay collections=

=As editor=

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

=Plays=

  • Strange Fruit (Amber Lane Press, 1980, {{ ISBN|978-0906399279}})
  • The Shelter (Amber Lane Press, 1984, {{ ISBN|978-0906399491}})
  • Playing Away (Faber and Faber, 1987, {{ISBN|978-0571145836}})
  • A Kind of Home – James Baldwin in Paris (BBC Radio 4, 9 January 2004)[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.
  • Hotel Cristobel (BBC Radio 3, 13 March 2005)[http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/fzqtj "Hotel Cristobel"], Drama on 3, BBC Radio 3.
  • A Long Way from Home (BBC Radio 3, 30 March 2008)[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009md7p "A Long Way from Home"], Drama on 3, BBC Radio 3.[http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/r574n "A Long Way from Home, by Caryl Phillips"], Drama on 3'', BBC .

Awards

References

= Notes =

{{Reflist|30em}}

= Sources =

  • {{cite journal|last=Bell|first=C. Rosalind|title=Worlds Within: An Interview with Caryl Phillips|journal=Callaloo|date=Summer 1991|volume=14|issue=3|pages=578–606|doi=10.2307/2931461|jstor=2931461}}
  • {{cite journal|last=Bewes|first=Timothy|title=Shame, Ventriloquy and the Problem of Cliche in Caryl Phillips|journal=Cultural Critique|date=Spring 2006|volume=63|pages=33–60|doi=10.1353/cul.2006.0014}}
  • {{cite web|last=Booker Prize Foundation|title=Caryl Phillips|url=http://www.themanbookerprize.com/people/caryl-phillips|publisher=Booker Prize Foundation|access-date=13 June 2012|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121027193951/http://themanbookerprize.com/people/caryl-phillips|archive-date=27 October 2012}}
  • {{cite web|last=British Council|title=Caryl Phillips|url=http://literature.britishcouncil.org/caryl-phillips|publisher=British Council|access-date=12 June 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120820012148/http://literature.britishcouncil.org/caryl-phillips|archive-date=20 August 2012|url-status=dead}}
  • {{cite web|last=Cummins|first=Anthony|date= 18 January 2025|title=Caryl Phillips: 'It was Britain that made me a writer'|work=The Guardian|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/18/caryl-phillips-novel-another-man-in-the-street-interview|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250118220121/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/18/caryl-phillips-novel-another-man-in-the-street-interview|archive-date=18 January 2025}}
  • {{cite journal|last=Eckstein |first=Lars |title=The Insistence of Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips |url=http://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/3555/3496 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130115161349/http://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/3555/3496 |url-status=dead |archive-date=2013-01-15 |journal=Ariel |date=April 2001 |volume=32 |issue=2 |pages=33–43 }}
  • {{cite news|last=Jaggi|first=Maya|author-link=Maya Jaggi|title=Caryl Phillips: The Guardian Profile|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities|access-date=12 June 2012|newspaper=The Guardian|date=3 November 2001}}
  • {{cite journal|last=Low|first=Gail|title='A Chorus of Common Memory': Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge and Crossing the River|journal=Research in African Literatures|date=Winter 1998|volume=29|issue=1|pages=121–141}}
  • {{cite news|last=Metcalfe|first=Anna|title=Small Talk: Caryl Phillips|url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bcc17536-7a61-11df-9cd7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xdTTH6rU|archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221211231247/https://www.ft.com/content/bcc17536-7a61-11df-9cd7-00144feabdc0#axzz1xdTTH6rU|archive-date=11 December 2022|url-access=subscription|url-status=live|access-date=12 June 2012|newspaper=The Financial Times|date=21 June 2010}}
  • {{cite journal|last1=Phillips|first1=Caryl|first2=Jenny |last2=Sharpe|title=Of this Time, of that Place|journal=Transition|year=1995|volume=68|issue=68|pages=154–161|ref={{harvid|Phillips|1995}}|doi=10.2307/2935298|jstor=2935298}}
  • {{cite news|last=Phillips|first=Caryl|title=Once upon a life|url=https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/17/caryl-phillips-edinburgh-once-upon-a-life|access-date=12 June 2012|newspaper=The Observer (Observer Magazine)|date=17 October 2010|page=14}}
  • {{cite web|last=Phillips|first=Caryl|title=Biography: Education and Teaching|year=2005–2010|url=http://www.carylphillips.com/education-teaching.html|work=Caryl Phillips: The Official Website|access-date=10 September 2012}}
  • {{cite web|last=Phillips|first=Caryl|title=Biography:Awards|year=2005–2010b|url=http://www.carylphillips.com/awards.html|work=Caryl Phillips|access-date=10 September 2012}}
  • {{cite news|last=Sethi|first=Anita|title=Caryl Phillips: I prefer not to raise my head above the parapet |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/caryl-phillips-i-prefer-not-to-raise-my-head-above-the-parapet-1688887.html|access-date=12 June 2012|newspaper=The Independent|date=22 May 2009}}
  • {{cite journal|last=Swift|first=Graham|author-link=Graham Swift|title=Caryl Phillips (An Interview)|journal=BOMB|date=Winter 1992|volume=38|url=http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1511|access-date=13 June 2012|archive-date=26 May 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120526071715/http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1511|url-status=dead}}

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.{{nbsp}}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.
  • [http://journal.afroeuropa.eu/index.php/afroeuropa/article/viewFile/57/71 Muñoz-Valdivieso, Sofia, "'Amazing Grace': The Ghosts of Newton, Equiano and Barber in Caryl Phillips's Fiction"]{{dead link|date=November 2016 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, 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

{{wikiquote}}

  • [http://www.carylphillips.com Caryl Phillips' official website]
  • [http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/phillips The Caryl Phillips Bibliography]
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20051030080323/http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth80 Caryl Phillips' Writers Page] at the British Council
  • [https://english.yale.edu/people/tenured-and-tenure-track-faculty-professors-creative-writers/caryl-phillips Phillips at Yale University]
  • Caryl Phillips Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
  • [https://www.npr.org/2015/03/21/394127475/lost-child-author-caryl-phillips-i-needed-to-know-where-i-came-from "'Lost Child' Author Caryl Phillips: 'I Needed To Know Where I Came From{{'"}}], NPR interview, 21 March 2015.

{{Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book Winners}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Phillips, Caryl}}

Category:1958 births

Category:20th-century British novelists

Category:20th-century English male writers

Category:20th-century British essayists

Category:21st-century English male writers

Category:21st-century British essayists

Category:21st-century novelists

Category:Alumni of the Queen's College, Oxford

Category:Black British writers

Category:British dramatists and playwrights

Category:British male dramatists and playwrights

Category:British male essayists

Category:British male novelists

Category:British non-fiction writers

Category:British republicans

Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature

Category:James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients

Category:Living people

Category:PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners

Category:Saint Kitts and Nevis emigrants to the United Kingdom

Category:Saint Kitts and Nevis literature

Category:Saint Kitts and Nevis writers

Category:Writers from Leeds