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Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips was born in Saint Kitts, West Indies in 1958. He grew up in Leeds and was educated at the University of Oxford. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of fourteen works of fiction and non-fiction. His book Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Man Booker prize. Phillips was the winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial prize. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark won the PEN Open Book Award in 2006. Colour Me English, a collection of essays which explore questions of identity and belonging, was published in 2011. His novel The Lost Child, a story of orphans and outcasts haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it, was published in 2015 and A View of the Empire at Sunset, about the writer Jean Rhys, was published in 2018. His forthcoming novel, Another Man in the Street, will be published in 2025. Phillips has taught at universities in Sweden, Singapore, India, Ghana, Barbados and the United States and is currently Professor of English at Yale University. He lives in North Carolina and New York.

Books in order of publication:

The Final Passage (1985)

A State of Independence (1986)

The European Tribe (1987)

Higher Ground (1989)

Cambridge (1991)

Crossing the River (1993)

The Nature of Blood (1997)

Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997)

The Right Set (1999)

The Atlantic Sound (2000)

In the Falling Snow (2000)

A New World Order (2001)

A Distant Shore (2003)

Dancing in the Dark (2005)

Foreigners (2007)

Conversations with Caryl Phillips (2009)

Colour Me English (2011)

The Lost Child (2015)

A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018)

Caryl Phillips Titles