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 River was short-li

This article in full comprises 3912 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 02 March 2004

Citation: Smethurst, Paul. "Caryl Phillips". The Literary Encyclopedia. 2 March 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3553, accessed 9 February 2010.]