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Latest Caryl Phillips' Novel Wins Commonwealth Writers Prize
Caryl Phillips, the novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and professor at Barnard, has won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his latest book, A Distant Shore (Knopf).
Presented in a different Commonwealth country each year, the prestigious prize is chosen by a pan-Commonwealth jury, whose chair this year was Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the poet, essayist and art critic. Phillips won the Best Book Prize, which includes a cash prize of $24,500.
Phillips is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard, where he has been a faculty member since 1998 and directs the Barnard Forum on Migration, a series of seminars, lectures, and readings that explore issues connected to the movement of people from one part of the world to another. Phillips recently was named Director of Initiatives in the Humanities. In this new role, he is developing a wide range of programs including student initiatives, new curricula, and local and global outreach programs for students and faculty.
A Distant Shore tells the story of a friendship between two displaced persons in contemporary England: Dorothy, a divorced, retired English schoolteacher with a troubled past, and Solomon, a 30-something survivor of a war-torn country in Africa. They meet in a small northern England town without knowing that this will be their last meaningful relationship, before they are destroyed by violence and prejudice.
Speaking on behalf of the prize jury, Wallace-Crabbe said of A Distant Shore : " This book speaks to our age and its entropy. The story moves with the converging lives of a middle-aged Midlands woman, declining into bewilderment, and an illegal? who flees to England from the appalling violence of his homeland. The everyday and the appalling walk hand in hand, with utter conviction. A heartbreaking novel, A Distant Shore asks whether civilisation can possibly survive."
Following a week of readings, the award was presented on Saturday, May 15, by Australian Premier Steve Bracks at a gala dinner at the State Library of Victoria.
Phillips, who was born in St. Kitts and raised and educated in Britain, was the Commonwealth Prize winner over Australia's Michelle de Kretser, Canada's Frances Itani and South Africa's Damon Galgut.
Mark Haddon won the 2004 Best First Book prize for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The shortlist included Kate Taylor from Canada, South African Diane Awerbuck and Lebanese-based Australian Nada Awar Jarrar.
Phillips, whose novel Crossing the River was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993, is the author of three books of nonfiction, The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound , and A New World Order , and five other novels, The Final Passage, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge , and The Nature of Blood . He has edited two anthologies, Extravagant Strangers and The Right Set . Phillips also writes for television, radio, theater, and film. His numerous awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Malcolm X Prize, and he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and a Lannan Literary Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. For more information about Phillips, visit www.carylphillips.com.
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