Karil Filips

Caryl Phillips (1958, Saint Kitts) moved to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds and studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. His literary career began with the plays Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982), and The Shelter (1983).

He is the author of numerous plays and documentaries for radio and television, as well as the screenplays for the films Playing Away (1986) and The Mystic Masseur (2001), based on the novel of the same name by V. S. Naipaul. He has published the 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), Foreigners (2007), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). His works of documentary prose include The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011).

He has edited the anthologies Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His works have been translated into more than ten languages. He has received numerous awards for his plays and novels, most notably the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993. A Distant Shore, which was nominated for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2003, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2004.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, as well as an Honorary Fellow of Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, where he currently teaches at Yale University.

“…confronting the great questions of change contains extraordinary creative potential. It was precisely this potential that enabled Caryl Phillips to transform the difficulties of migration into a rich body of prose and drama that reveals the harsh realities of displaced lives, while simultaneously creating space for understanding and compassion. Migration in Phillips’s work is not merely a major literary theme, but also a deeply personal question for a man born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts who, at just four months old, moved with his parents to the United Kingdom. His life was thus marked from the very beginning by the fate of ancestors forcibly taken from Africa, determining the direction in which his writing would develop. […]

“In contrast to works that portray migration as a site for the exciting reimagining of one’s identity, Caryl Phillips’s novels and plays offer an insight into the world of the most vulnerable groups of the global population: slaves and their descendants, refugees, undocumented workers, concentration-camp victims, and victims of patriarchal oppression. […] In his explorations, Phillips connects the slave trade, the repatriation of freed slaves, the persecution of Jews in the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, migration from the Caribbean to Great Britain, and contemporary forms of discrimination in America and Britain, whose recurring victims in his work are immigrants, African Americans, and women.

“By pointing to violence against the other as a historical constant, Phillips does not erase the specific nature of the experiences he describes, nor does he seek to equate slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust by establishing parallels between them. On the contrary, he approaches them with great respect and understanding, seeking to show how oppression changes its form, target, and context and thus survives.

“At the same time, Phillips’s work offers refuge and paves the way toward understanding both the victims and their tormentors. His characters undoubtedly play the most important role in his exploration of these themes: sensitive and neglected outsiders, migrants, loners, and anonymous masses from different historical contexts, alongside the occasional historical antagonist who can himself be interpreted as a victim of historical circumstances and processes that compromise his humanity.

“With the skill of a gifted medium, Caryl Phillips summons the voices of ‘ordinary people’ from distant places and historical moments—members of the African and Jewish diasporas, white Englishwomen and their families, slave traders and slave owners – and places them all within the same liminal narrative space. One gets the impression that Phillips does not conduct this chorus of shared memory, as he calls it in Crossing the River (1994), but rather, like any true medium, allows the ghosts to speak through him and tell their own stories. One of the most striking features of their narratives is their crossing of boundaries of space, time, cultures, and perspectives, as well as their questioning of the boundaries between history and fiction.”

– Ariјana Luburić Cvijanović