Author and Playwright Caryl Phillips to Speak at The College of Wooster

Free public event to be held on Tuesday, April 5, in Room 009 of Severance Hall

WOOSTER, Ohio — Prominent author, playwright, and screenwriter Caryl Phillips will visit The College of Wooster on Tuesday, April 5, and present a talk, titled “On Becoming a Writer.” The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7:30 p.m. in Room 009 of Severance Hall (944 College Mall). Refreshments will be available following the reading, along with a book-signing by the author and a chance to talk with him about his work.

Phillips’ work has won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. A reviewer in The Christian Science Monitor described him as an “insightful and sympathetic chronicler of race, British identity, and the immigrant experience.” In Britain, he was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of the Best of Young British Writers. He has also received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award — the James Tait Black Memorial Prize — for his novel Crossing the River, which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. His novel A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize, while his novel Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. Phillips’ latest book, the novel In the Falling Snow, was published in 2009, and another book, Colour Me English: Selected Essays, will be published in July.

In addition, Phillips has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage in 1996. He also wrote the screenplay for the film "Playing Away" (1986), while his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.

Presently a professor of English at Yale University, Phillips has also taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States. In 1999, he was chosen as the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year.

Additional information about Phillips' talk is available by phone (330-263-2575) or e-mail.