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CARYL PHILLIPS (B. 1958) Caryl Phillips came to the UK from St Kitts while only a few weeks old, and was raised in the northern English city of Leeds. After graduating from Queens College, Oxford, in 1979, he worked initially as a playwright. In 1985 he published his first novel, The Final Passage, and has since secured an international reputation as one of the world’s leading novelists with his subsequent fiction: A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003) and Dancing in Dark (2005). Phillips’s prose writing, notable for its innovative formal qualities and hauntingly still prose style, ranges across the cultural and racial legacies of colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, America and beyond. In tracing the cat’s cradle of connections which binds us all to the sordid histories of empire, Phillips explores the derogation of human life by racism and prejudice while constantly looking beyond these divisive encounters to a post-racial, ethically just future. In a similar vein, his non-fiction includes a meditation on the theme of home across several continents in The Atlantic Sound (2000), a collection of essays A New World Order (2001), and Foreigners: three English lives (2007). Previously Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University, Phillips is currently Professor of English at Yale University, USA.