Book description
What do we mean by 'English'? How does that image square with
reality? How does our island look from abroad, and what aspects of our
experience do we share with, for example, America - a nation built by
outsiders and the huddled masses?
Taking as its starting point a moving recollection of growing up in
Leeds during the 1970s, Colour Me English broadens into a
reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of essays and
other non-fiction writing which ranges from the literary to the
cultural and autobiographical.
Elsewhere, Caryl Phillips goes on to describe the experience of
living and working in America, and travels in Sierra Leone, Ghana,
Belgium and France and beyond. He considers the lives and works of
many figures including Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Billie Holiday
and Luther Vandross, and how their experiences are refracted through
the prisms of writing, music and cinema.
But Colour Me English always circles back to questions of
identity and belonging, to the nature of tribal belonging and of its
reverse, exclusion.
Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New
York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is
the author of fourteen works of fiction and non-fiction.
Crossing the River
was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won
the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the
Sunday Times
Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British
Writers 1993.
A Distant Shore
won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and
Dancing in the Dark
was shortlisted in 2006.
