Phillips was also listed among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists of 1993. His most recent novel,
Crossing the River (1993), was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and received the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Also in 1994 his oeuvre as a whole won the prestigious Lannan Literary Award for fiction. In addition he has been the recipient of an Arts Council of Great Britain Bursary in Drama (1984), a British Council Fiftieth Anniversary Fellowship (1984), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992), and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (1994). In spite of these achievements, Phillips remains healthily self-critical in his interview with Bell: "The reason I set out to write hasn't been achieved yet. I set out to create or attempt to create a body of work in drama and prose that I think is the best body of work I could possibly produce, out of the peculiar relationship between myself, my history, and my environment. That's an ongoing process."
Caryl Phillips was born 13 March 1958 on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, then a British colony. Almost immediately after his birth, his parents--Lillian and Malcolm Phillips--joined the mass migration of West Indians to Britain, and Phillips, the oldest of four sons, grew up "riddled with the cultural confusions of being black and British" in the "predominantly white working-class areas" of Leeds and Birmingham and attended "mainly white-dominated middle-class schools." His personal crisis of identity came to a head during his studies at Queen's College, Oxford (1976-1979), and coincided with the larger social crisis that engulfed a postcolonial Britain in which the sons and daughters of migrants from countries of the former empire were no longer willing to be treated like second-class citizens.
