Writer Caryl Phillips Will Read from His Most Recent Work

Celebrated writer and professor of English at Yale, Caryl Phillips, will read from his latest novel at St. Anthony Hall at Yale, 483 College Street, on October 24, 4:30 p.m.

Recently appointed to the Yale faculty, Phillips is a major voice of the African Diaspora, the author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction. One of his novels, “Crossing the River,” won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize, the highest award for literature in the United Kingdom. His novel “A Distant Shore” won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Phillips is the editor of two anthologies, and he has written for television, radio, theater and film. His non-fiction includes a travel narrative, “The European Tribe” (1987), winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and “The Atlantic Sound” (2000), an account of his journey to three hubs of the Atlantic slave trade: Liverpool, Elmina on the west coast of Ghana and Charleston, South Carolina. “A New World Order: Selected Essays” was published in 2001. Phillips is also the editor of “Extravagant Strangers” (1997), an ambitious anthology of work by British writers born outside Britain; among them, Ignatius Sancho, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Selvon and Salman Rushdie. Phillips wrote the film adaptation of V. S. Naipaul’s novel “The Mystic Masseur,” first screened in 2001.

The author has taught at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the United States. He was a professor of English at Amherst College, 1994–98, and before joining the Yale faculty this year, was professor of English and the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.

Phillips will read from his latest novel, “Dancing in the Dark,” a fictionalized account of the celebrated early 20th-century entertainer Bert Williams, who, though African-American, performed on stages across America in blackface.