ABSTRACT
This interview, which took place in London, was conducted soon after the
publication of Crossing the River (1993), which spans 250 years of the
African diaspora and of relations between black and white people. The
novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize in 1993. Among Caryl Phillips’s other novels are The Final
Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989)
and Cambridge (1991). His latest work, A Distant Shore, was published
in 2003. He has also written plays for stage, radio and screen and several
collections of non-fictional essays such as The European Tribe (1987) and
A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001). Much of his work focuses on
the question of diaspora and the black Atlantic recovering the unwritten
histories of black people in Britain before the large-scale migrations follow-
ing the arrival of SS Windrush in 1948 or the civil rights movement in the
United States.
