Caryl Phillips – författare

Caryl Phillips's first novel tells the story of Leila, a nineteen-year-old woman living on a small Caribbean island in the 1950s. Unsatisfied with life on the island, Leila decides to leave her friends and follow her mother overseas, taking her restless husband Michael and her young son with her. Her subsequent passage to England brings her face to face with the consequences of the decisions she has made to determine her life on her own terms.

'A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society' ObserverFrancis Barber, 'given' to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, afforded an unusual depth of freedom, which, after Johnson's death, would help hasten his wretched demise....Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and who ended his life in debt and despair...David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life and death would question the reality of English justice, and serve as a wake-up call for the entire nation.Each of these men's stories is told in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the tragedy of their lives. And each explores the themes at the heart of Caryl Phillips' work - belonging, identity, and race.

'The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' This is how W.C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans.Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to 'play the coon'. Off-stage, Williams was a tall, light-skinned man with marked poise and dignity; on-stage he now became a shuffling, inept 'nigger' who wore blackface make-up. As the new century dawned they were headlining on Broadway. But the mask was beginning to overwhelm Williams and he sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking, unable to escape the blackface his public demanded.

Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeWinner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for FictionCaryl Phillips’ ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War.‘Epic and frequently astonishing’The Times‘Its resonance continues to deepen’New York Times

Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cartwright, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation slave, educated and Christianised by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity.

Caryl Phillips is one of the most respected writers of his generation. An award-winning author best known for his fiction, essays and stage plays, he is also the author of radio plays, nine of which were broadcast by the BBC between 1984 and 2016. Previously locked away in Phillips’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, these hidden gems are now published in Caryl Phillips’s Radio Plays, the first collection of these important works of drama.Despite being previously overlooked, these radio plays are fully creative works and constitute an integral part of Caryl Phillips’s literary universe. Not only do these dramatic texts display the author’s hallmark mix of formal elegance and sharp social criticism, but they also offer compelling points of comparison with the rest of his wider writing. From the experience on an eighteenth-century slave ship and the life of a migrant family in 1980s England, to an account of James Baldwin's time in Paris and Marvin Gaye's stay in Belgium, these plays grapple with expansive themes in creative and dramatic ways.Contextualized by a scholarly introduction by Bénédicte Ledent, this volume introduces these works in the published form for the first time, allowing readers a better grasp of Phillips's narrative techniques, offering fascinating vistas into his imaginary world, which ranges from the history of the African diaspora to the predicament of displaced individuals the world over.

Caryl Phillips is one of the most respected writers of his generation. An award-winning author best known for his fiction, essays and stage plays, he has also written radio plays, nine of which were broadcast by the BBC between 1984 and 2016. Previously locked away in Phillips’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, these hidden gems are now published in Caryl Phillips’s Radio Plays, the first collection of these important works of drama.Despite being previously overlooked, these radio plays are fully creative works and constitute an integral part of Caryl Phillips’s literary universe. Not only do these dramatic texts display the author’s hallmark mix of formal elegance and sharp social criticism, but they also offer compelling points of comparison with the rest of his wider writing. From the experience on an eighteenth-century slave ship and the life of a migrant family in 1980s England, to an account of James Baldwin's time in Paris and Marvin Gaye's stay in Belgium, these plays grapple with expansive themes in creative and dramatic ways.Contextualized by a scholarly introduction by Bénédicte Ledent, this volume introduces these works in the published form for the first time, allowing readers a better grasp of Phillips's narrative techniques, offering fascinating vistas into his imaginary world, which ranges from the history of the African diaspora to the predicament of displaced individuals the world over.

The powerful and evocative story of a young West Indian man's search for home in 1960s London - by the multi-award-winning author dubbed 'one of the literary giants of our time' (New York Times)**A Guardian book to look forward to in 2025**‘A masterful stylist writing at the top of his powers’ Anthony Joseph‘An engrossing, artfully constructed chronicle of lives tragically unfulfilled’ Mail on Sunday‘A remarkable achievement’ Washington Post‘A moving, accomplished study of the vulnerabilities carried and concealed by human beings on their journeys throughout the world’ Financial Times____________________________________________In the early Sixties, Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill – then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman.Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in London to the present day, Caryl Phillips paints a striking portrait of a flawed but vividly alive man grappling with the lifelong disillusionments of exile – and the uniquely complicated identity of the Windrush generation.Another Man in the Street is an unforgettable story of loss, displacement, belonging, and the triumph of Black resilience - epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate; and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London.___________________________________________________Praise for Caryl Phillips‘One of Britain's pre-eminent writers’ Guardian‘One of the literary giants of our time’ New York Times‘Phillips is a linguistic and cultural virtuoso’ The Times

The powerful and evocative story of a young West Indian man's search for home in 1960s London - by the multi-award-winning author dubbed 'one of the literary giants of our time' (New York Times)**A Guardian book to look forward to in 2025**‘A masterful stylist writing at the top of his powers’ Anthony Joseph‘An engrossing, artfully constructed chronicle of lives tragically unfulfilled’ Mail on Sunday‘A remarkable achievement’ Washington Post‘A moving, accomplished study of the vulnerabilities carried and concealed by human beings on their journeys throughout the world’ Financial Times____________________________________________In the early Sixties, Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work, first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill – then as a rent collector for unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman.Shadowing Victor in London from his early struggles to the present day, Caryl Phillips paints a striking portrait of a flawed but vividly alive man grappling with the lifelong disillusionments of exile – and the uniquely complicated identity of the Windrush generation.___________________________________________________Praise for Caryl Phillips‘One of Britain's pre-eminent writers’ Guardian‘One of the literary giants of our time’ New York Times‘Phillips is a linguistic and cultural virtuoso’ The Times

Discover this heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past from award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips – inspired by Wuthering Heights.It is the 1960s. Isolated from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, Monica Johnson raises her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors. But when her younger son Tommy, a loner who is bullied at school, disappears, the family bond is demolished – with devastating consequences.Deftly intertwined with this modern narrative is the story of the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys. Recovering the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, The Lost Child is an exquisite novel about exile, freedom and what it is to belong.‘Heartbreaking…compelling’ Independent