Prof. Caryl Phillips: What is Africa to Me?

Prof. Caryl Phillips

Download Prof. Caryl Phillips: What is Africa to Me? (9:14)

Professor Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts in the Caribbean. At the age of four months, his family moved to Britain. Phillips grew up in Leeds and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

Phillips is  a prolific writer. His works include the plays 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 the 1996 the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. 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).

Phillips 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.

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.

A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his latest book is In the Falling Snow.