An Interview with Caryl Phillips

courtesy of Caryl Phillips

The novelist, playwright, travel writer, essayist, and scriptwriter Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, brought to the United Kingdom as an infant, and raised in Yorkshire. In Colour Me English: Selected Essays (2011), he explains that as a rare black child in a tough, working-class area of Leeds, his early years were often spent “either fighting or running.” Reading therefore became a “refuge.” As these comments suggest, Phillips has written candidly throughout his career of his persistent feeing of unbelonging; for example, in A New World Order (2001) he recalls:

I grew up in Leeds in the sixties and seventies, in a world in which everybody, from teachers to policemen, felt it appropriate to ask me—some more forcefully than others—for an explanation of where I was from. The answer “Leeds,” or “Yorkshire,” was never going to satisfy them. Of course, as a result, it was never going to satisfy me either.

In 1976 Phillips left Leeds to study at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he initially pursued a degree in psychology before a tutor convinced him that, if he really wanted to understand how people’s minds work, English literature would be a more rewarding path. It was on a summer vacation after his second year at the university that Phillips first journeyed to the United States, where he found himself relaxing on a beach in Los Angeles reading Richard Wright’s Native Son. While the Caribbean writing of V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming reflected a landscape that felt alien to his own urban British upbringing, African American writers like Wright and James Baldwin became important literary role models for Phillips. Reading Wright’s novel was a decisive moment in his writing career, as he explains in his collection of essays The European Tribe (1987): “I felt as if an explosion had taken place inside my head. If I had to point to any one moment that seemed crucial in my desire to be a writer, it was then, as the Pacific surf began to wash up around the deck chair.” In the 1980s, Phillips left the U.K. on a more permanent basis and now resides primarily in New York, although he frequently returns to Britain for visits. Correspondingly, he has described his notion of “home” as being “plural” and once requested that his ashes be scattered at his “Atlantic home”—a point in the Atlantic Ocean between the Africa of his ancestors, the England of his childhood, and North America, where he now lives. Having previously taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he became the youngest tenured professor of English in the U.S., and also at Columbia University, Phillips is now a professor at Yale University.

Phillips began his literary career as a playwright: Strange Fruit was produced in 1980 at the Crucible theater in Sheffield and was followed by Where There Is Darkness (1982), The Shelter (1983), and The Wasted Years (1984), a radio play. His first novel, The Final Passage, was published in 1985. Since then, he has written a range of fiction and nonfiction books, spanning from the sixteenth-century Venice of his novel The Nature of Blood (1997) to the twentieth-century Britain of A Distant Shore (2004).

Phillips is a writer of great sensitivity and lyricism, and over the years, his works have been awarded a host of high-profile literary prizes, including the Malcolm X Prize, the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the PEN/Beyond the Margins Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lannan fellowship. Phillips is also a fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society for the Arts. His novel Crossing the River (1993) was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Phillips has also achieved success as a scriptwriter, penning the screenplays for Horace Ové’s film Playing Away (1986) and [End Page...