Colour Me English
  • Published: 15 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409028925
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

Colour Me English

Formats & editions
EBook
15 Aug 2011
Paperback
5 Jun 2017
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A reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of non-fiction writing from one of our great novelists.

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.
  • Published: 15 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409028925
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

About the author

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Crossing the River (shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1993) and A Distant Shore (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004). Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN Open Book Award 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 Granta Best of Young British Writers 1993. He has also written for television, radio, theatre and film.

portrait photo of Caryl Phillips

Also by Caryl Phillips

The Lost Child
A View of the Empire at Sunset
Higher Ground
In the Falling Snow
Cambridge
The Nature of Blood
Foreigners: Three English Lives
See all

Praise for Colour Me English

A polymorphous delight that always retains at its core the notion of identity... Phillips places himself in the tradition of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin as a writer who, by moving abroad, has gained perspective on his homeland. And it is a perspective we would do well to learn from

Robert Epstein, Independent on Sunday

An informal intellectual memoir... The question of belonging and exclusion suffuses his work, colouring his personal engagement with history, religion, literature, music and nationality. It has been the making of him

The Times

A thought-provoking collection by an accomplished author whose subtle, unobtrusive style allows him to explore familiar subjects in an original way

New Statesman

As lucid and urgently written as these meditations are, the main attractions in Colour Me English are the character sketches of other writers... Phillips passionately defends the capacity of fiction to shepherd us through these times of social change, by forcing us 'to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself'

Sunday Times

An alpha-class writer, both as a phrase-maker and an observer of human nature

Mail on Sunday

His insight sparkles in every line

Independent

I was utterly beguiled by his original outlook on literature, life, race and 'belonging'

Spectator
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