May 2008
With Professor Stephen Clingman, March 29th 2008, Venice, Italy.
With Professor Stephen Clingman, March 29th 2008, Venice, Italy.
A new radio play, A Long Way From Home, based on the last few years of the life of Marvin Gaye, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday March 30th. It should be available online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3.
Foreigners publication 26 October
Read the official press release.
Reissues forthcoming in 2008
You can now download an electronic version of the programme (PDF) for Rough Crossings, the Simon Schama play adapted to stage by Caryl Phillips. The play will debut 14 September at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Oberon Books will be publishing Rough Crossings, also in September, in the UK.
Headlong Theatre unites Simon Schama and Caryl Phillips for a landmark theatrical event.
1789. As the American War of Independence reaches its climax, the freed plantation slave Thomas Peters and John Clarkson of the British navy embark upon a journey which will redefine racial politics and change attitudes towards slavery forever...
Rough Crossings tells the heroic story of the resettlement of a group of former slaves in West Africa and of the bruising relationship between Peters and Clarkson, divided by the barriers of race, but united in their ambitions of equality. Moving from the meeting houses of London to the inhospitable terrain of Sierra Leone, Rough Crossings is a vibrantly theatrical exploration of racial identity, of home, of what it means to be free.
Performance Schedule
"Not afraid of ambiguity," an interview with Caryl Phillips by Axel Stähler, Bonn/Münster. Read the full interview [PDF].
Caryl's new book, Foreigners, will be published in the USA and Britain in Fall 2007.
Knopf catalog copy - Fall 2007
From "one of the literary giants of our times" (The New York Times)—a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society.
Francis Barber, "given" to the great l8th century writer Samuel Johnson, afforded an unusual depth of freedom, which, after Johnson's death, would help hasten his wretched demise....Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and who ended his life in debt and despair...David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice, and whose death at the hands of police in 1969 served as a wake up call for the entire nation.
Each of these men's stories is told in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the simple notions of haplessness that have been used to explain the tragedy of their lives. And each explores, in entirely new ways, the themes—at once timeless and urgent—that have been at the heart of all of Caryl Phillips' work: belonging, identity, and race.
Foreigners is among his most powerful, empathic, and profoundly affecting books.
Hear a podcast of Caryl's appearance with Glyn Maxwell at Lensic Theatre in Santa Fe, NM (11 November 2006) — Listen Now
Three novels—Dancing in the Dark, Crossing the River, and Higher Ground—will be reissued in paperback this September by Vintage UK.
A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. Dancing in the Dark was published in September 2005 by Secker and Warburg in the UK and by Alfred A. Knopf in the USA. Paperback editions will be published by Vintage in September 2006 in the United States and October 2006 in the UK.
Click here for a full listing of scheduled readings and appearances.