Born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, brought up in Leeds, and educated at Oxford, Caryl Phillips has written for television, radio, theatre, and cinema, and is the author of three works of nonfiction and eight novels. Much of his writing has focused on displacement, especially the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade for the African Diaspora.

The Final Passage, his first novel, won the 1985 Malcolm X Prize for Literature; A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Mr. Phillips’s latest novel, Dancing In The Dark, was published in 2005.