Africana Studies Hosts Caryl Phillips
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Africana Studies hosts author, Caryl Phillips on November 16 at 7:00 p.m. in the Chancellor’s Suite, University Center.
Kittitian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist, Caryl Phillips is often described as a Black Atlantic writer because in many of his work he explores and documents the experiences of people of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean, and the United States. His writing is concerned with issues of migration, origins, belongings, and exclusion. A prolific writer, Phillips is the author of 11 novels, 4 non-fiction books, and the editor of two anthologies.
He has received numerous awards including Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a British Council Fellowship. His play The Wasted Years won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year. Phillips has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage (1985). He wrote the screenplays for the film Playing Away (1986) and the Merchant Ivory Adaptation of V. S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (2001) which won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and the recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence. Phillips has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States. He is currently Professor of English at Yale University.