LECTURES

Caryl Phillips is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in Leeds, U.K. He currently lives in New York. He is the author of numerous books of nonfiction and fiction, including Crossing the River, winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, A Distant Shore, winner of the 2004 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and Dancing in the Dark, winner of the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.

He began his writing career in the theater. He has also written several dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film based on his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplays for the films Playing Away (1986) and the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (2001).

The Distinguished Writers Series
The series reminds the world that reading, writing, conversation and laughter are related arts. The format is simple, the emotional reward complex. The writers read, have a conversation with the series curator, then engage in an open dialogue with the audience.

“The rigors of creativity are best appreciated at close range in small rooms where ideas swerve and loop and float with the kind of inventiveness and assurance that makes the mind swirl …” -Colin Channer, Series Curator