Crossing the River

Caryl Phillips, born in 1958 in St. Kitts and raised in Leeds, England, is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist renowned for exploring the experiences of the African diaspora. His most notable works include the novels Crossing the River (1993), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Cambridge (1991), and A Distant Shore (2003), which earned the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; he has received awards such as the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/Beyond Margins Award.