Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, in 1958, and brought up in Leeds, England. After graduating from Queen's College, Oxford, with an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature in 1979, he wrote his first novel,
The Final Passage(1985), for which he won the Malcolm X prize for fiction. His subsequent novels,
A State of Independence(1986)
, Higher Ground(1989)
, Cambridge(1991)
, Crossing the River(1993),
The Nature of Blood(1997) and, most recently,
A Distant Shore(2003), have won him several literary distinctions, including the 1992 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His novel
Crossing The Riverwas short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize. In addition, Phillips has won a British Council Fellowship, a Guggenheim…
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Citation: Kuehn, Julia Christine, Paul Smethurst. "Caryl Phillips". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3553, accessed 22 November 2024.]