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Caryl PhillipsCaryl Phillips
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BiographyCaryl 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.
Caryl Phillips' book, Dancing in the Dark (2005), a novelisation of the life of Bert Williams, the American entertainer was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His book Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), is about the lives of three black men - Francis Barber, Randolph Turpin and David Oluwale.
His latest novel is In the Falling Snow (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Screenplay, Travel
BibliographyStrange Fruit (play) Amber Lane Press, 1981 Where There is Darkness (play) Amber Lane Press, 1982 The Shelter (play) Amber Lane Press, 1984 The Final Passage Faber and Faber, 1985 The Wasted Years (play) Methuen, 1985 A State of Independence Faber and Faber, 1986 Playing Away (screenplay) Faber and Faber, 1987 The European Tribe Faber and Faber, 1987 Higher Ground Viking, 1989 Cambridge Bloomsbury, 1991 Crossing the River Bloomsbury, 1993 Extravagant Strangers (editor) Faber and Faber, 1997 The Nature of Blood Faber and Faber, 1997 The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis (editor) Faber and Faber, 1999 The Atlantic Sound Faber and Faber, 2000 A New World Order: Selected Essays Secker & Warburg, 2001 A Distant Shore Secker & Warburg, 2003 Dancing in the Dark Secker & Warburg, 2005 Foreigners: Three English Lives Secker & Warburg, 2007 In the Falling Snow Harvill Secker, 2009
Prizes and awards1984 Giles Cooper Award The Wasted Years 1985 Malcolm X Prize for Literature The Final Passage 1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize The European Tribe 1992 Guggenheim Fellowship 1992 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award Cambridge 1993 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Crossing the River 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Crossing the River 1994 Lannan Literary Award (Fiction) 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Distant Shore 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Dancing in the Dark
Critical PerspectiveIn the introduction to Phillips’s selected essays and journalism, A New World Order (2001), there is a refrain which is reiterated through the collection: 'I am of, and not of, this place'. It is a sentence that captures the essence of Phillips's work, which is typically concerned with the tensions between home and the unhomely; between migration and settlement; strangeness and familiarity; arrival and departure. Phillips is a writer who appears most at home when he is away, journeying between places. Accordingly, he has remarked that he wishes to be 'buried' in the Atlantic, at the crossroads between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean.
Although Phillips is best known today as a novelist, his initial artistic leanings were towards drama. Phillips's first play, Strange Fruit (1981), an allusion to the song by Billie Holliday, centres on a Caribbean family that has lived in Britain for the past twenty years. Followed by Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1984), these plays reveal an early preoccupation with many of the key themes within Phillips's fiction, most notably perhaps, the transatlantic slave trade. It is a theme Phillips return to recently in the stage adaptation of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings (2005) a history of slavery.
As the title of his first novel suggests, slavery is also a tangential theme in The Final Passage (1985). The book follows the story of Leila and her selfish, unsupportive husband Michael as they travel from the Caribbean to England in the 1950s. At the time of its publication in 1985, the novel broke new ground as the first 'second generation' black British novel to return to the experience of the so-called 'Windrush generation' (the first post-war West Indians to arrive in England on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948). Although Leila's lack of agency in the novel has been regarded as a weakness by some, it is by placing a female character at the centre of his narrative, that Phillips manages to disturb the male-centred narratives associated with early settler fictions by the likes of Sam Selvon, George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul. Beyond the surface realism of this deceptively simple narrative the reader is confronted with the kind of formal and linguistic experimentation of later work such as Crossing the River (1993). Structured around five sections ('The End', 'Home', 'England', 'The Passage' and 'Winter'), The Final Passage is a disorienting, discontinuous narrative where the beginning is 'The End' and the end suggests a new kind of beginning (for Leila and her child).
The return 'home' that is anticipated at the end of The Final Passage becomes the primary subject of Phillips's next novel, A State of Independence (1986). Like Moses, the archetypal character of Selvon's 'London' fictions, Bertram's return to a newly independent Caribbean is not as ideal as he had hoped. Where The Final Passage closes with Leila poised between England and the Caribbean, A State of Independence ends with Bertram poised between the Caribbean and England. Phillips’s work offers an ongoing departure from ideas of national belonging, and his non-fictional travel books (The European Tribe, 1987; The Atlantic Sound, 2000) reveal a particular preoccupation with what Phillips has diagnosed at different moments 'the gift of displacement' and 'the high anxiety of belonging'.
Arguably his most acclaimed (Booker shortlisted) novel to date, Crossing the River, exemplifies the kind of restlessness witnessed in Phillips’s non-fiction. The novel dramatises the experience of diasporic dislocation by evoking a black Atlantic contact zone at which Africa, America and Europe uneasily encounter one another. Framed by the narrative of an African ancestor, Crossing the River details a series of 'crossings' or journeys. The opening section follows Nash, an emancipated slave, as he travels from America to Liberia and from The Pagan Coast to the interior. The second section centres on Martha, whose journey across America has come to a stand still, but whose memories of the past and dreams of the future evoke a series of arrivals and departures. The penultimate section conjures the trade routes of Captain James Hamilton, while in the final section a provincial Yorkshire landscape becomes the unlikely setting for a transatlantic black/white encounter during the war. In its serial accounts of journeying, (not to mention the journeying between journeys that the move from section to section of the novel inaugurate), Crossing the River shares certain similarities with the work of other key writers of the 1990s, including David Dabydeen and Salman Rushdie. Like Dabydeen, Phillips is interested in how narratives of slavery (also see Higher Ground, 1989 and Cambridge, 1991 which share a similar historical and geographical range to Crossing the River) inform the contemporary migrant condition. Like Rushdie, Phillips is preoccupied by the rhetoric and narrative structure of migration, from the formal dislocations of Crossing the River, to the recurring images of vegetation roots and rootlessness running through his fiction as a whole.
The allegorical qualities of Phillips's carefully crafted prose are most tellingly present in the more recent fiction, and novels such as The Nature of Blood (1997). The book centres on the survivor of a Nazi death camp, an enigmatic figure whose tale is entangled with those of others in a narrative that ranges from15th-century Venice to present day Israel. Beneath this dark narrative of personal suffering and exile is a larger articulation of borderlands, crossings, movements and migrations.
A Distant Shore (2003) is Phillips’s first novel set firmly in the present, and is in some ways reminiscent of the final section of Crossing the River (see above). The plot, which unfolds in a village in northern England, revolves around the unlikely, enigmatic friendship of a retired white schoolteacher (Dorothy) and an African refugee (Solomon). Solomon’s tragic trajectory in the novel, from the war torn country he flees to his death at the hands of English racists, is unremittingly bleak and has both disturbed and divided readers. There is a journalistic quality to the sections tracing Solomon’s past, and A Distant Shore appears to mark the beginning of a stylistic shift in Phillips’s writing, which increasingly works at the border between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and information. Phillips’s next novel, Dancing in the Dark, 2005 (based on the black African American entertainer Bert Williams, 1974-1922) incorporates newspaper reports. Meanwhile his recent book, Foreigners (2007), blends fiction, reportage and historical fact to produce a moving account of three black Britons: Francis Barber (a ‘gift’ to Samuel Johnson), Randolph Turpin (a boxing world champion) and David Oluwale (a drifter murdered by the police). Ironically subtitled ‘Three English Lives’, Foreigners was reviewed in The Guardian in the following glowing terms.
'Each character bears the unmistakable imprint of a misfit. Through Phillips's inspired blend of fact, fiction and citation emerge the voices of three men who refused to compromise their own value system. Each, for good or ill, was zealous in defence of their particular modus operandi. Through them, Phillips explores the very concept of the foreigner, masterfully illustrating the complexity of successfully existing as "other" within a majority culture determined to remain unaffected by the presence of difference.'
In his latest novel, In the Falling Snow (2009), Phillips deals with the figure of the misfit from a very different angle. Keith Gordon, the novel’s protagonist, is divorced, jobless, and drinking to excess. He aspires to be a writer, but the reader should be wary of confusing his perspective with that of Phillips (as some of the reviews have done), despite and because of the fact the novel rarely departs from Keith’s point of view. It is only in the superbly observed monologue, delivered by Keith’s dying father at the close of the novel, that we are, like Keith, shaken out of our complacency, as the narrative shifts into a very different gear. Earl Gordon’s story is so sustained, so remote, from what has come before that any consoling fictional unity is destroyed. As with all of his most innovative work to date, Phillips’s complex rendering of memory through formal experimentation and flashback is key to the novel’s success.
Dr James Procter, 2009
For an in-depth critical review see Caryl Phillips by Helen Thomas (Northcote House, 2003: Writers and their Work Series).
Author statement'Why do I write? Because it is a way of organizing my feelings about myself and the world around me. Without writing I fear I may metamorphose into something unpleasant. Writing feeds me literally and metaphorically. Writing provides a means by which I can sit in judgement upon myself and reach conclusions (however temporary) that enable me to shuffle towards the next day and another crisis.
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