Prizewinning Author Caryl Phillips to Read

Acclaimed author Caryl Phillips, whose oeuvre Time magazine has called "one of literature's great meditations on race and identity," will read from new work on Tuesday, March 6, at 8 p.m. in Goodhart Music Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Phillips, who was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, raised in Leeds, England, and educated at Oxford, is renowned for his exploration of the consequences of displacement and diaspora. His fiction often employs patchworks of narratives set in different historical periods to cross boundaries of race, gender and nationality. His forthcoming book, Foreigners, to be published by Knopf this fall, is described as "a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society."

A prolific writer who has published eight novels and three books of nonfiction, Phillips has also written for television, theater, radio and film. He has edited two anthologies and taught literature and creative writing at Amherst College and Barnard College; he is now a professor of English at Yale University.

Phillips is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992, Phillips was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers, and his novel Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. His novel A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Phillips' appearance at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art, the Grunfeld Lecture Fund, the Creative Writing Program, the Center for Visual Culture and the Department of History.

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