Caryl Phillips

Julia Christine Kuehn (University of Hong Kong); Paul Smethurst (University of Hong Kong)
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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-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 19 March 2024.]

3553 Caryl Phillips 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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