Literary Birthday – 13 March – Caryl Phillips

Happy Birthday, Caryl Phillips, born 13 March 1958.

Caryl Phillips Quotes

1. I think reading and writing are intimately connected. New writers are defining themselves as writers by reading what other people have written, in a sense trying to write books that have not been written already.
2. I think we must help people to understand that the first thing that comes out on the page is there to be revised.
3. All writers are territorial. They’re like dogs marking their territory. The great task of being a writer is to discover what your territory is, and you do revisit similar themes in different ways. I think I’m very lucky to have found a patch of earth which resonates very powerfully with me because of my own personal life history, but also seems to resonate powerfully with the narrative of the country.
4. Living inside a book for many years it is perhaps inevitable that one loses sight of what the book is actually about. That is, if one ever really knew in the first place. (FSG)
5. Writers move stealthily, and almost always by instinct. However on completing a manuscript one is forced to describe to agents, editors, friends, and family the subject-matter of these months and years of furtiveness. So, what is your book about? It’s at this point that the full extent of the myopia is laid bare. (FSG)

Caryl Phillips is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is best known for his novels A Distant Shore and Crossing the River, in which he explores the experiences of peoples of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean, and the United States. His latest novel is Another Man in the Street. He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was made an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He has been inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Source for image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caryl_%22Caz%22_Phillips.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar