by Caryl Phillips

Born in 1958 on the West Indian island of St. Kitts, Caryl Phillips was raised in Britain, where his family immigrated soon after his birth. While studying English literature at Oxford University, Phillips took a five-week bus trip through the United States. During the journey, he read works by African American authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, which he found deeply inspiring for his own writing. After graduating from Oxford in 1979, Phillips began writing plays for stage, radio, and television. His works enjoyed immediate success, and on the proceeds Phillips was able to travel back to the West Indies for the first time. A subsequent tour of Europe in the mid-1980s resulted in a book of essays, The European Tribe (1987), criticizing European ethnocentricity. As a black man traveling in America and Europe, as during his youth in Britain, Phillips frequently encountered...