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Barnard
Professor Caryl Phillips Gains Nomination for National Book
Critics Circle Award with A Distant Shore
 New
York, NY, January 23, 2004— Caryl Phillips, award-winning
novelist and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social
Order at Barnard College, has been nominated for the National
Book Critics Circle Award for fiction with his latest book
A Distant Shore (Alfred A. Knopf), among four other nominees.
Details on this prestigious prize were reported in The
New York Times. Click here for the full
story.
Phillips has also been named Director of Initiatives in the
Humanities at Barnard. In his new role, he will continue to
develop a wide range of programs including student initiatives,
new curricula, and local and global outreach programs for
students and faculty. In 2000, Phillips and Professor Mary
Gordon led the effort to create a new creative writing program
with extensive course offerings, coupled with an exceptional
faculty of novelists and poets. He also initiated an innovative
outreach writing program taught by Barnard students at local
public high schools, funded by the After-School Corporation,
which was created with a challenge grant from philanthropist
George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Together with fellow
faculty members James Basker and Maire Jaanus, Phillips is
currently developing a new international course, which will
involve foreign travel, to be launched next fall.
"We are pleased to announce that Caryl Phillips has accepted
this new position, which will allow Barnard to expand its
outreach programs, and create opportunities for student and
faculty exchanges both locally and globally," said Elizabeth
S. Boylan, Provost and Dean of the Faculty. "Professor
Phillips is the ideal person to head this effort, given his
vast experience in, and contacts with, the international arts,
media, film, and literary communities, as well as his long
teaching career beyond the U.S. borders at universities in
India, Singapore, Barbados, Sweden, and Ghana."
Phillips, who joined the Barnard faculty in 1998, also 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. Each year
the Forum hosts distinguished writers and academics who address
a broad range of issues which relate to the important questions
of migration and social order. The Forum is supported by a
bequest establishing the Weiss International Fellowship Fund
to bring distinguished scholars in literature and the arts
to Barnard.
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. The
New York Times wrote "Like all of Phillips’
novels, A Distant Shore gives you a lot to think about:
Phillips builds his fiction around provocative issues…his
novels have a way of growing on you, staying with you long
after you’ve closed the book."
Publisher’s Weekly wrote that "Phillips is
a true master of form, who manipulates narrative time (which
skips, speeds and sometimes runs backward) and perspective
to create a disjointed sense of place that mirrors the tortured,
fractured inner lives of his characters."
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.
Contact:
Petra Tuomi, Barnard Public Affairs, 212-854-7907, ptuomi@barnard.edu
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