A short life of the author
Caryl Phillips (b. 13 March 1958) was born in St Kitts and raised in Leeds, England. He studied English at Oxford and has taught at numerous universities, including Yale.
Life and Career
The Final Passage (1985) — about a Caribbean couple emigrating to England in the 1950s — was his debut. Cambridge (1991) — about a slave plantation in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, told from the perspectives of both a visiting Englishwoman and an enslaved man — demonstrated his ambition.
Crossing the River (1993, Booker shortlist) — which spans three centuries and three continents, following the descendants of an African father who sold his children into slavery — is his masterpiece. The Nature of Blood (1997) — which interweaves the stories of a Holocaust survivor, a fifteenth-century Venetian Jew, and an Ethiopian Jew in modern Israel — extends this project of linking different histories of persecution and displacement.
Major Works and Themes
Phillips writes about the African diaspora, the legacy of slavery, and the experience of not belonging — of being caught between cultures, between histories, between identities. His fiction is formally inventive, morally serious, and deeply humane.
Key Works
- Crossing the River (1993) — Booker shortlist
- The Nature of Blood (1997)
- A Distant Shore (2003)
Collecting Phillips
The Final Passage (1985, Faber and Faber) — the debut — brings $20–$60. Phillips signs at literary events.