Caryl Phillips – författare

Caryl Phillips, who “pits himself against any kind of received wisdom” (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London.At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in London with dreams of becoming a journalist in the “mother country.” Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter’s lonely secretary, Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England. Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the backdrop of a nation that is slowly, reluctantly evolving into a modern, multiracial society, the story unfolds to reveal the truth of both Peter’s tragic background and Ruth’s agonizing secret, and we witness Victor, out of his depth, adjusting to the painful realities of life in his new country. Both epic in its sweep and devastatingly intimate in its portrayal of damaged lives caught between two worlds, Caryl Phillips’s Another Man in the Street lays bare the traumas that often overtake personal relationships in the wake of societal transformation, and the high price of attempting to reinvent oneself.

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy AwardCaryl Phillips''s The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson—cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner—and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Phillips intertwines her modern narrative with the childhood of one of literature''s most enigmatic lost boys, as he deftly conjures young Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights, and his ragged existence before Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to his family. The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte''s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. A critically acclaimed and sublimely talented storyteller, Caryl Phillips is "in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul" (Booklist) and "his novels have a way of growing on you, staying with you long after you''ve closed the book." (The New York Times Book Review) A true literary feat, The Lost Child recovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by transforming a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own.