Extravagant Strangers - Softcover

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts, West Indies, in 1958. Brought up in England, he has written for television, radio, theatre and the screen.$$$He is the author of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Final Passage, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River (shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize), The Nature of Blood, A State of Independence, Atlantic Sound and The European Tribe. He is also the editor of Extravagant Strangers and The Right Set, an anthology of writing on tennis. His adaptation of The Final Passage was directed by Peter Hall and screened by Channel Four. His awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Since 1998 he has been Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University. He divides his time between homes in the UK and the USA.

Aiming to show that the "mongrelization" of Britain and British literature began well before the second half of the 20th century, this selection incorporates 18th-century black writers with direct experience of the slave trade, such as Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. It also looks at white writers whose accident of birth took place in a British colony, resulting in a similar sense of ambivalence, whether in the jingoism of a Rudyard Kipling or the social commitment of a George Orwell. And it reflects the emergence of a group of writers who demonstrate the same mixture of attachment and detachment which marks them as products of the British Empire, including V.S. Naipaul and Linton Kwesi Johnson.