Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include 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, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and 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.
Books in order of publication:
The Final Passage (Faber and Faber, 1985
A State of Independence (Faber and Faber, 1986
Higher Ground: A Novel in Three Parts (Viking, 1989)
Cambridge (Bloomsbury, 1991)
Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993)
The Nature of Blood (1997; Vintage, 2008)
A Distant Shore (Secker, 2003)
Dancing in the Dark (Secker, 2005)
Foreigners: Three English Lives (Harvill Secker, 2007)
In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker, 2009)
The Lost Child (Oneworld Publications, 2015)
A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)
Another Man in the Street – 2025
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