Literary Birthday – 13 March – Caryl Phillips

Happy Birthday, Caryl Phillips, born 13 March 1958.

Three 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.

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. He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

by Amanda Patterson

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